Any Bitter Thing

by Monica Wood

  The neighbor cat returned, eyeing Paulie, who was falling asleep against Mariette’s chest.

  “Remember the cats, Mariette?” I said.

  “The bachelors,” she said listlessly. All summer long it had been remember this and remember that. I’d worn her out.

  “We never had cats,” Charlie said. “My mother always said they were too sneaky.”

  “The truth is,” I said to one and all, “I had a visitation.”

  “The truth is,” Drew said quietly, “you live here with us, on Earth.”

  “We should get going,” Mariette said, hoisting her son, who had collapsed against her, blissfully unconscious. Paulie couldn’t be woken, and I envied him that.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Drew asked our friends. “Tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

  “Just wait,” Charlie said. “Wait it out.”

  “I feel like a ghost myself,” I said. “Nobody can see me.”

  I’m so lonely, I wanted to tell them. I woke up so monstrously lonely. I slipped into the house, bringing the cat with me. The air inside was warmer, what Father Mike used to call “close.” In the living room, among Drew’s large-format photographs of house fires and bridge collapses and construction sites, hung a framed snapshot of Father Mike. He is looking off to the side—at me, in fact—his face soft in the magical light of afternoon; but there is another light present, too.

  Mariette’s mother took this picture in the foyer of her farmhouse, catching him near an oversized window that let in an abundance of light. He had come to fetch me for supper, so he looks hungry, a little. I had spent the afternoon in the Blanchards’ parlor, sewing shoes—moccasins, to be precise—my first skill. One or two afternoons a week Mrs. Blanchard put some rockabilly on the stereo and set us to work: Mariette and me, and sometimes Mariette’s little brothers, Buddy and Bernard.

  He looks hungry, but also bemused, like someone about to open a present. We had just taught him how to sew a shoe. I hadn’t wanted to leave the Blanchards’ house, so Mariette, stalling, said, “Show him, Maman.”

  He laughed, red hair falling over his forehead as he inspected the heaps of shoe parts. “I wouldn’t know up from down,” he said, grinning. “Our girls are the experts. Right, Vivienne?”

  “Yes, Father,” she agreed. “They’re the experts, our little chickens.”

  Experts. I pronounced this my favorite word, ever, right on the spot. And so we were. Our ritual was to gather in Mrs. Blanchard’s parlor, choosing a fat, glinting needle and a strand of rawhide from her neatly coiled skeins. Each of us claimed a leather glove—fingerless, shaped to our right hand, darkened with sweat. Next, we lugged a pair of buckets from the foyer, the aroma of freshly soaked leather radiating skyward. After stiffening the rawhide by running it back and forth against a block of wax, we pulled an upper from one bucket, a lower from the other, and lined up their matching holes. Our task called for concentration, strong hands, and sometimes silence. Over and over, we threaded the rawhide through the holes in a piecrust stitch, evenly fluted along the toe end of the shoe. The heel end—a shapeless flap—would be someone else’s job back at the factory.

  Thirty-six shoes to a case. Crimp, thread, pull. Crimp, thread, pull. Crimp, thread, pull. Mrs. Blanchard dispatched the final tying off in a stupendous thwip thwip, fingers flying. Mariette and I were slow by contrast, the little boys nearly useless, but this was piecework, time really was money, and though Mrs. Blanchard sewed five shoes to our one, we often made the difference between meeting quota and not.

  They could arrest her for that, Mrs. Hanson said more than once, but left it at that because Mrs. Blanchard was a pretty woman who had married a drinker. Mrs. Hanson was right, of course. The work was highly illegal, a kind of magnanimous sweatshop, really. But who could mind if Father Mike didn’t? We sewed sometimes for entire afternoons, the music boosting production, peanut-butter sandwiches stacked on a platter, all of us drunk on Mrs. Blanchard’s company and the music and the heady smell of leather and oil.

  Why did Mariette and I never recall these times? We were nine years old on the summer afternoon of this photograph; by fall I would be taken from there; by winter would come news of Father Mike’s death. How had we allowed the most lighted days of our childhood to fade behind us, unremarked?

  He crouched before me that day, picked up my hands and kissed them, admiring the calluses. “This,” he said, “is the working girl’s stigmata.” He was proud of my hands, and I guessed it had something to do with his memories of farm life on Prince Edward Island, where children learned how to do, to make, to fix, to solve. I rested my hands in his, palms up, showing him one more proof of how lucky he was to have me.

  “Hey,” said Buddy. “I’m an expert, too.”

  “You too, young man.”

  “And me.”

  “And you too, Bernard.”

  “Show him, Maman,” Mariette said.

  “It’s easy! It’s easy! Maman, make Father Mike sew a shoe!”

  “Make him, Maman!”

  “Oh, brother,” he said, releasing my hands, which meant yes, and there was a pleasant rippling of voices as he sat down and allowed Mrs. Blanchard to guide his fingers through a glove. His small hands looked bigger when he tried to take a stitch. The little boys leaned close, expecting magic, but the hands that could turn wine to blood had no aptitude for piecework. Mariette and I giggled till we had to cross our legs to hold our pee. Finally he sprang up, and to our blank astonishment, began to sing. You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, he sang with Elvis, making moony eyes at Major, the Blanchards’ earnest basset hound. Father Mike’s cassock swung back and forth from his hips, and we all got up to dance, the shabby parlor quivering with movement and raised voices.

  I remember this. All this sweetness.

  Back then Mrs. Blanchard had a burbling, contagious laugh, and as she danced with her children, side-stepping the forbearing dog, I was visited by the most unexpected wish for a mother. Father Mike had tried to keep my mother alive for me, but it was like hearing about Rapunzel or Snow White, a seamless beauty who lived in the realm of imagination. I’d never thought to envision her as someone who might cough or sigh or open a breadbox or sew a shoe. But I did at that moment, watching Father Mike move across a parlor rug littered with shoe parts and dog hair, because of how his face looked in the warm bath of a woman’s laughter.

  Wait, Mrs. Blanchard called, running to get a camera, then caught him just as he danced his way into the foyer and turned to look at me.

  On the day Aunt Celie came to take me, nobody thought to stow the Lucy Maud Montgomery books into my tartan carpetbag, or the scapular medal that dangled from my bedpost, or the angel doll that stood atop my dresser. My aunt dutifully packed my dresses and underwear, my socks and schoolbooks, but it was Mrs. Blanchard who appeared like a fairy out of the forest that morning to give me the photograph, thrusting it into my hands like an exposed secret.

  FIVE

  Not long before Father Mike was sent away, Mariette’s own father disappeared. This forever-conjoined loss, I believe, is what bound us through years of separation when most childhood friendships, even one that burned like ours, would have guttered out.

  Ray Blanchard’s previous desertions had passed unregretted. It was generally believed that when he missed a boat boarding—and two weeks’ pay—he either stayed near the docks, prowling the bars, or hastened back to New Brunswick, his original home, to drink and suffer for a mysterious and necessary period of time before joining up again with his true life. The house unwound whenever Mr. Blanchard went away, no arrête, arrête from Mariette’s mother as he raged around the kitchen knocking pots off the stove. Then, any random midnight, back he’d come, unwashed and unrepentant, blatting in French. Fish talk, Mrs. Blanchard always called it, you save that talk for your fish. I covered Mariette with my body as we snuggled in her attic bed, listening to the commotion, the loud complaints and Mrs. Blanchard’s famished pleading, non, non, les peti
ts. Les p’tits, les p tits, is how she said it, meaning us, cowering in the attic, and the baby brothers on the second floor hiding in the closet with the dog.

  Tais-toi! The children will hear!

  Then, sometimes—not often—a sound that could have been shoe parts slapped into their buckets, but wasn’t—followed by a death-white silence.

  After a couple of weeks, off he went again, making the long drive along the river to the sea, leaving a wake of relief. Mrs. Blanchard brisked about her kitchen as if God himself had appeared in the night and scrubbed another layer of weight from her bird-bones body.

  I kept these things to myself, afraid I’d be forbidden to go back there.

  I liked Mr. Blanchard sober. Loosed-limbed and good-looking, he acted out the parts in stories he loved to tell in his zesty New Brunswick accent, mostly about hauntings in his childhood home back in Shediac. Violence hummed just beneath the surface of these tales, which pinned us, thrilled and pie-eyed, against the backs of our chairs with our mouths agape.

  “Stop it, Ray,” Mrs. Blanchard admonished him, “you give them the nightmares.”

  “That’s how we tell stories up home,” he snapped. “You want them to stay babies?” Mrs. Blanchard’s people were from Sherbrooke, Quebec, a different strain altogether. Her sisters, with their urgent sit-sit-sit accents, tended toward stories of predictable temptations followed by the joy of redemption.

  Pauline, the oldest sister, was there on this day I’m thinking of, not long before Mr. Blanchard vanished for good. A warm night, first night of my ninth summer; Mr. Blanchard had his shirtsleeves rolled above his knotted forearms. He called all his wife’s sisters “my girl,” even Pauline. Mariette and I liked her best. Unmarried, she felt it necessary to advertise, accompanying her tight jeans and pullovers with high heels and lipstick even in daytime. The other sisters were too busy chasing babies to interest us much.

  “That’s quite the caboose you carrying ’round, my girl” Mr. Blanchard said to Pauline.

  “Go catch some fish, Ray,” she retorted, swinging the caboose in question down on one of Mrs. Blanchard’s kitchen chairs. She had sheathed herself in white shorts and an electric blue tank top with black piping; her brunette hair had turned platinum overnight, cut straight at the jawline like the singers in ABBA. “Make yourself useful for a change.”

  He laughed then—a clammy, slow-moving chortle that always made me feel funny. Mariette went silent, then laughed along with him. Then I did.

  “I can make myself useful, my girl,” he said. “Say when”

  “You watch yourself, Raymond,” Pauline said, her rouged lips slicked into a grim line. Her skinny heels dug into the linoleum. “The Levesque girls don’t take shit from the like of you.”

  Then he made that laugh again, and Mrs. Blanchard told him to stop it or else. “Is that a threat?” Mr. Blanchard asked, still laughing, squeezing Mrs. Blanchard’s tiny face between his big thumb and fingers. “Is that a threat from the Levesque girls?” This he said in French. Then he gave his wife a long, embarrassing kiss, and clomped upstairs to take a nap before heading out to sea come night.

  I did not know—had no way of knowing, since I lived with a celibate man whose idea of a party was to invite other celibate men once per season to eat hamburgers and smoke cigars and play poker or pinochle half the night—what that kiss meant. It looked like a weapon, but couldn’t be.

  “Are you scared of him?” I asked Mariette afterward. We were sitting on the front steps of the rectory, surveying our world: church, church hall, the long gravel driveway that ended at the main road, and also, through the wide, tamped-down lane through the trees, the back windows of Mariette’s house. “I mean in the daytime,” I added. It went without saying that on those hollery nights Mr. Blanchard could be terrifying.

  She turned abruptly, her hair whipping against my face. “No. He’s my papa.” Then she grabbed her tipped-over bike and tore through the shortcut, where I had to pedal furiously to catch her. Her lie felt like a bruise inside my body.

  That evening, I asked Father Mike about the kiss. He was spooning fudge batter into a pan. Mrs. Hanson’s cake—white cake with white frosting—sat untouched on the counter. I had been instructed to bring it to Mariette’s for our sleepover, an unusual gesture on Mrs. Hanson’s part, but her pity for Mrs. Blanchard took more than one form.

  “He kissed her right in front of everybody,” I informed my uncle. “Like this.” I demonstrated on the back of the spoon, then licked the chocolate off.

  “Stop that,” Father Mike said, tapping the pan on the table to even out the batter.

  “It looked kind of yucky,” I said.

  “It probably was.”

  “How come priests can’t get married?” I’d broached this subject before, which he usually took to mean that I wanted a mother. Sometimes he said, “Because we’re married to the Church,” and sometimes he went all rubbery and confessed that he’d all but stolen me from Aunt Celie, after which I declared my relief and gratitude that I’d landed here, in this house, with our cats and our Lucy Maud Montgomery novels, and not in Aunt Celie’s catless, bookless, faraway house full of boys. Then he’d puddle up for my mother and father while I sniffled a bit, trying to feel the way he was feeling.

  But that night Father Mike took neither tack. Instead, he said, “Because you don’t get everything you want in life.” He was cutting the fudge already, his forearms working, shaping messy squares from which a fragrant warmth rose. Fudge was our specialty, though we never cared to follow the last of the directions, the part that said wait. He applied himself to his task, and I felt, as other children must have felt with their parents, a sudden, unwanted realization that his life was a mystery. “Don’t burn your tongue,” he said as I dropped a gob of fudge into my gullet, baby-bird style. He wiped my mouth with a napkin, then said, “Chapter eight tonight” We were reading Anne of Green Gables, our favorite book. I reminded him that I was headed to Mariette’s.

  “Is he home?” He always referred to Mr. Blanchard as “he.”

  “He’s going fishing.” As if to prove my point, Mr. Blanchard’s croupy pickup coughed to life next door. Mrs. Blanchard maintained, not without humor, that her husband refused to fix the exhaust system because he enjoyed swearing at it too much.

  I scooped a hoggish piece of fudge out of the pan to bring to Mariette—a secret present with which we planned to taunt Buddy and Bernard. “Mr. Blanchard says one of these days he’s going out to sea and never coming back.”

  “Let’s hope he’s a man of his word,” Father Mike said.

  “Mariette hates when he talks like that.”

  “Mariette isn’t lucky like we are,” he said. “But she’s got a good mother. And a good friend, too, hasn’t she? Isn’t God looking after her in His own way?” He ran the knife under the tap water and covered the fudge. “Ray hasn’t been scaring you, has he?”

  “Nope,” I said, knowing better than to repeat Mr. Blanchard’s stories of bloody hauntings. It was true my nightmares had returned, but they weren’t about Mr. Blanchard. They were about the cats running away, or the rectory burning down, or Father Mike vanishing in a blizzard. It takes children a long time to understand what they have lost.

  “He’d better not,” my uncle said, taking my chunk of fudge and wrapping it in wax paper, then wrapping, pointedly, two more pieces for the boys. “Come on. I’ll walk you over there.”

  First he made me brush my teeth and hair. Mrs. Blanchard had her hands full with Buddy and Bernard, and Father Mike was a stickler for good hygiene.

  We took the shortcut, the suggestive scent of early summer emanating from the thickety woods. Father Mike still wore his cassock from the evening Mass—Saturdays tended to be breathless affairs, with nursing-home rounds all afternoon and Mass at five and six-thirty, followed by supper and fudge. Father Mike was holding the cake; I kept my hand on his forearm as we steadied through the approaching dusk and its accompanying rustles, expecting to arrive at
the Blanchards’ back door and find their dog, who knew us, ready to let us in.

  But that evening the dog did not let us in; he nosed at the screen door, which had been locked from the inside—an unheard-of custom in Hinton back then, almost an insult to your fellow man. Poor, slow-witted Major butted his head against the door and then gave up, looking mournfully up at us. “Hello?” Father Mike called, peering through the screen.

  Mrs. Blanchard appeared then, emerging from the depths of the house into the ill-lighted foyer, holding a package of frozen peas over one eye. Mariette trailed her, crying, Buddy and Bernard draggling behind, Buddy’s pee-heavy shorts grazing his knees.

  Mrs. Blanchard unlatched the door.

  “What happened?” Father Mike demanded, setting down the cake and prying her fingers from her face. She looked like a child being inspected after a fall off a bike.

  “It was Papa!” Mariette blubbered. Major raised his tragic muzzle, then scuttled into the next room to search out some quiet.

  “Les p’tits,” was all Mrs. Blanchard could choke out. “Father, they saw everything.” She was one of those rare women who look beautiful crying, and despite the peas hunked against her eye, she reminded me of the Weeping Mary statues the nuns at St. Catherine’s gave out for very special rewards.

  “That son of a bitch” Father Mike whispered, and did not take it back. Then, remembering the children, added, “Don’t be afraid, Vivienne. It’s just us now. Don’t cry.” I was struck by the word us as he ministered to this family. He gave the boys a square of fudge and the promise of cake; he calmed Mariette by asking innocuous questions that required only a “yes,” “yes,” “yes” he eased Mrs. Blanchard into one of the kitchen chairs. Us. He seemed to have entered a place that had heretofore been barred from him.

  He did not look like a priest just then, despite his cassock and collar. Neither did he look like my uncle, the one who wore flip-flops and a porkpie hat and embarrassing plaid swim trunks to the beach. Since the age of two I had accompanied him to hospitals and nursing homes, to farmhouses with badly hung doors, to sickrooms ablaze with votives. I had witnessed his kindness, his inclining ways, his bone-deep sweetness. I had seen spits of anger, moments of grief, worshipful bursts of laughter. He was my uncle. He was a priest. This was, I believed, the full repertoire of his responsibility and endeavor.