Any Bitter Thing

by Monica Wood

  How still, this town that no longer knows him. He heads upriver, a tremor of disquiet working steadily through his body. He slows at the second bend, aware of the volume of his own breathing. The sign has been painted afresh. He cuts the headlights and inches down the curve of driveway, past the parish hall, past the church, stopping just before the clearing. He can just make out the tattered remains of the moon garden. It is only March. It is possible that someone has kept it up, that come May the candytuft will pop through, then the white tulips, after that the first of the astilbes. He longs to inspect it for signs of survival but he is too afraid.

  In the turnaround squats an overweight American sedan, a classic priest car. A light burns in the upstairs hallway—possibly the same night-light he installed for Lizzy, a square of glass depicting a family of bears eating porridge. But probably not. In the agony of those first weeks of aftermath, he tortured himself with visions of the place being stripped of her—of them—her clothing, her crayon marks, their cookie toolkit, her socks in the mudroom, the porridge-eating bears that shaped the light.

  Between the trees he catches a glint of river. That’s the spot, he thinks, suddenly knowing: the spot where the river is no longer only river, where ocean, just a few drops of it, begins.

  He skulks along the perimeter, sheltered by the pines and a shocking growth of maple, poplar, and a single imperial oak, until he reaches the grown-over break in the trees. The shape of the shortcut survives amongst an undergrowth of maple suckers and brush. The farmhouse still stands. She no longer lives there but her presence does. He smells her: sumac and river, pine and earth.

  Adjusting to the dark, he can just make out the roofline, the east-facing eaves, and if his eye travels down, steady, there it is: the back door, the little railing, a few flagstones that pass for a patio. He tracks the path to her house, stopping here. Here. Then here.

  Then: here.

  The tree limbs seem to point. The ground sinks a little. The needles gather more thickly here, or so he imagines. Then—as if God himself is watching, a bystander with nothing better to do than give directions—the clouds part and the moon makes a white connection from the middle of the sky straight to the unmarked grave of Raymond Blanchard.

  When she unlatches the back door that night twenty-one years ago, he thinks it’s a dream, for he has fallen asleep in the blue parlor chair and startles awake, confused. The day has been long with priestly duties and constant, engulfing thoughts of Vivienne in her lovely white dress with the red snowflakes. He finds himself in his chair, rabat and collar and jacket still on, Breviary collapsed on his lap.

  Someone rattles the kitchen door and barrels into the parlor. What—? he cries, adrenalin already spilling. Vivienne. Her blouse oddly wet, her arms oddly blemished. Her face is somebody else’s face, everything shrinking around the stung eyes of a wild creature.

  Father, hear my confession! She throws herself at his feet, like Eve after eating the apple, looking nothing like the woman he held in his arms just an evening ago, his vows on the verge of breaking.

  What’s happened? he says. Vivienne, get up.

  Say you will hear my confession!

  Frightened, he blesses her, inclines his head. He will hear her.

  It’s Ray, she chokes.

  Ray is at sea. Has Ray been lost at sea?

  Father—

  He barely hears the rest. A few wild words and she gets off her knees, breathless, leaving a stain on the floor. Hurry up, Father! Bring the sacrament! She pulls him out of the chair, into the kitchen, Hurry up! Hurry up! as he reaches for the small leather case. She seizes his hand and pulls him out the door and over the steps and into the yard toward the part in the trees. He came back, she gasps, running ahead of him now, flinging the words back over her sweat-soaked shoulder. He came back, Father! I didn’t mean it, I couldn’t help it!

  Why is she calling him Father? Already he disbelieves what she has confessed to him. He expects to find anything at the end of this path, anything but the thing she has told him to expect. He expects Ray. Ray at the ready. This will be the man-to-man he has so often dreaded. Ray Blanchard swaggering out of the house. With a shotgun? A broken bottle? One of those hooks that go on a boat?

  Running behind her, eyes fixed on the sweaty trailing wisps of her hair, God forgive him, he chooses. Running, disoriented, running into the lane in the middle of the night only because she has commanded him to, he chooses her.

  The Blanchards’ lights are out but the moonlight bears in. Ray Blanchard lies face down in the dirt at the edge of the moon garden, limbs splayed. He looks like a starfish that might have washed up on one of his stinking decks, some untouchable, dead thing.

  What happened? Vivienne! What happened?

  Quiet! she yips. Parle pas si fort! Someone will hear you! She glances at her dark windows, then clutches at her shirt front as if she means to rip it off. She does the same to her hair; he has never witnessed such a quaking; it reminds him of the religious ecstasy he has long envied but only read about.

  He is quaking, too. He reaches down, says something to Ray: drunk, he tells himself, smelling alcohol and piss, Ray Blanchard drunk again, he tells himself, willing the thing in front of his eyes to become something other than what it so obviously is. The shovel thrown sideways like a spent bullet. The viscous puddle beneath Ray Blanchard’s cursed skull.

  What in God’s name?

  Father, give him the sacrament.

  The flowers in her moon garden, identical to his but profuse even in autumn, do not sway. Their cupped white faces watch him.

  He turns the man over: ruined face, nose bloodied and flattened from a hard fall forward. He examines the mashed jaw, slides his hand along the neck where nothing pulses.

  Please, Father, she says. Her crying recalls the winnowing of birds in flight. I require you to make the prayers. She sounds more French, farther away, with each uttered word, like a fresh immigrant unfamiliar with the ways of her new home.

  He unzips the leather case, removes the vial of oil. He anoints Ray Blanchard’s caked forehead, speaking in Latin, his voice no more substantial than a flittering candle. From the case he takes a tiny book, The Golden Key of Heaven, given to him at seminary by an old priest who saw the potential of vocation in a young, eager man. The book is a relic, obsolete even when it was first given to him, but he opens it now, thumbing blood onto the onionskin pages. He finds his place and unleashes a torrent of Latin, reading by the unrelenting moonlight.

  How did she do this, a woman no bigger than a bird? He scrambles to his feet and vomits into the white, white flowers.

  She wipes his mouth with her hand, and he smells blood. Help me, Father.

  Her body turns into a trick of the eye, changing under scrutiny. Her arms, no bigger around than young branches, are finely strung with muscle; her hands, used to shoemaking and hot water, knot with power as her fists close. Help me.

  She picks up the shovel by its bloody head. Take this.

  For God’s sake, Vivienne. Call the police.

  They’ll take my children, she hisses. They’ll put me in jail.

  Vivienne. Take hold of yourself.

  I didn’t mean it, Father. He missed his boarding. He came back. He tried to pee on my flowers.

  Still she is calling him Father.

  The police will understand, he says. Everyone will understand, Vivienne. Everyone knows about Ray. You have nothing to be afraid of.

  A lie. He knows this is a lie. Here is Ray, eyes milky and half open. Caught from behind and hit. And hit. And hit and hit and hit and hit and hit. His wife’s blouse puckers with blood.

  She holds up the shovel. He avoids her eyes, tucking his little book and leather case into his breast pocket. She places the shovel between his hands, curls his fingers around the handle, and he follows her into the woods a few yards off the path, an untamed spot strewn with sticks and branches.

  Nothing holds. The night is too bright; there is both a stillness and a pulsing t
hat alters his senses, makes walking feel like swimming, speaking feel like thinking. He forgets that Ray is dead, then remembers. Then forgets. He is holding a shovel, shocked, perhaps in shock, but not sorry. An unfamiliar emotion buzzes through his buzzing head, like an insect that has been present for a very long time but is just now making itself known. He does not know what this feeling is, only what it is not.

  This feeling is not sorrow.

  I’m begging you. Father, I’m begging you.

  He clears a spot and begins to dig, reciting the Burial Absolution. This he knows by heart. Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei . . . Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. He whispers, digging, trying to stay the boiling in his head.

  This feeling is not pity.

  His muscles remember the work of the farm, a boy’s pride in helping his father and uncle dig by hand the furrows of his mother’s vegetable patch, the foundation for the new root cellar. The smell of turned earth fills him, now, as then, with a confusing wistfulness, a nostalgia for something that has not yet happened. He bends down and up, down and up, each short breath slicking back at the end in a half-fulfilled cry.

  Kyrie eleison, he says, remembering again: Ray is dead. He is breathing hard, wiping his hair with his wrist, flicking dirt—mercifully dry and reeking of earth—from his thighs and knees. Make the response, Vivienne.

  Christe eleison, she gasps. The shoveling sounds soft, sickening, as if he were digging into living flesh.

  Kyrie eleison, he says.

  Christe eleison, she responds, calmer now.

  This feeling is not regret.

  Such slow going. His back burns. Vivienne disappears, returning with a short-handled garden spade they have both used for transplanting lilies. She digs beside him, mute and focused. They breathe in tandem, wet with effort. Again, he forgets. He digs and digs, becoming nothing but a body in motion, a body at work, a body physically engaged, a body being used, a feeling he has not encountered in a very long time and it is not, even under these circumstances, an unwelcome feeling, for he keeps forgetting why this hole is being dug, the present moment keeps slipping, the woman sweating beside him keeps fading from view, he keeps believing himself elsewhere, transported moment to moment to different times and places in the way of a complicated dream that begs to be told next morning to the first willing ear.

  He digs and digs, this hole becoming other holes: holes for outhouses, holes for irises, holes for animals—his mother’s beloved work horse, Charles Laughton; the dogs and cats, dozens of them it seems—holes of different depths and widths and always that suggestive smell of earth. A hole for a hawk he found inexplicably dead in the field, russet breast ablaze in the sun-buttered morning, talons relaxed and unsuspecting. He goes back there, admiring again that lovely raptor, its eyes dull but still beautiful.

  Heaven might smell like this. He is knee high in the earth—a narrow hole, this one, more like a short trench, something for battle—knee high, then waist high, and then he startles awake, Vivienne abruptly and unspeakably here, in this hole, exhausted and panting, asking to get out, so he drops his shovel—he is here now, in this hole—and helps her to higher ground, his hands sliding down her sweat-slicked calves. She crouches above him, up there on earth. For a moment—a single, nauseating second—he expects her to fill the hole with him in it.

  Vivienne, he says, coming to. Think what we’re doing. But she won’t. Staring down, she blocks the moonlight.

  Eventually he scuttles out, roachlike, head throbbing, the hole smelling of worms and beetles and not the earthen perfume he wants to remember.

  It’s too late, she says, sweeping her arm over the hole, the night so bright she makes shadows.

  This feeling is not revulsion.

  He follows her back to the dooryard, where they retrieve Ray’s leaking body—muscles burled but horridly pliant beneath a filthy layer of shirt—and roll it into the hole like a carpet being dropped at the dump.

  In nomini Patri . . . He is crying now, drowning.

  She strips off her spattered blouse, cleans her hands with the sleeves, and throws it into the hole. Then her skirt, and her shoes, a pair of moccasins she stitched with her own hands, the leather spackled with blood. She regards him, alert and urgent, her skin sheening, then reaches to unhook his rabat, his collar. She tears them from him, holds them over the hole in the earth, and lets them drop.

  He looks down at their mingled clothes and vomits again.

  This feeling is not disbelief.

  She begins to scratch the earth with the tip of her spade, raking pine needles and spent leaves over their sin. But he is the one who knows how to fill a grave. This hole, again, becomes other holes; he fills and tamps, fills and tamps, places rocks to discourage animals, fills again, tamps again, then strews the ground again with broken branches.

  That’s all, she says. The moon has moved. He steals a glance at her half-naked body, dismayed to find the polished stone of her back clotted with healed-over scrapes, fading bruises.

  At one time he could have shamed Ray Blanchard, threatened him, compassioned him into changing his ways. He had the power: God on his side. Or, God on one side; on the other, his own jealousy. And fear.

  He did nothing then. Now, he helps her.

  She floats across the shimmering ground, slips into the house, and returns wearing a housecoat and a clean pair of moccasins. In his shirtsleeves he misses the weight of his rabat and collar. Then it is over, the shovels washed under the outside spigot and brought to the shed; the ground hosed down and raked over.

  This feeling is not surprise.

  He wipes his face with his hands, glancing at the upstairs windows, and finds a fleeting shape there. He hopes it is Ray, forgetting again that Ray is dead. If Ray came downstairs it would be a relief. If Ray came downstairs and beat him senseless, it would be a relief. If Ray came downstairs, he would beat him in turn, one whack for every dent in Vivienne’s narrow back. If Ray came downstairs he would do the job himself and dig the hole again and it is shame he feels, shame for his friend’s scraped back, for not choosing to see until now.

  This feeling is shame.

  We have to get rid of the truck, Vivienne says.

  When she puts the keys into his hands their skin slides together; it feels like blood, though it is only the water they have used to wash off the blood. She tells him where to take the truck, where exactly, her mind working quick and merciless. It’s a place he knows only vaguely, thick with ticks and bramble, a path down to the quarry and then a steep dropoff to freezing water. Three teenagers drowned there decades ago, before the mills stopped dumping and the river rejuvenated itself. Local children swim in the river now, the quarry a forbidden and forbidding place. She tells how to go to this place no one goes.

  She starts down the path to the rectory. I’ll wait in the kitchen, she says. In case Lizzy wakes up.

  What about—

  My children sleep like the dead.

  The truck smells of oil and fish and alcohol and other, far worse things that he probably only imagines. He vomits again on the way to the quarry, slowing down, veering the truck as he aims the stream on the passenger-side floor. Twice he swerves against the wooded shoulder and fishtails back toward the yellow line. The floor moves weirdly with things he recognizes: empty bottles, a rattling can of WD-40, a rag that used to be a shirt; and things he doesn’t: stout hexagonal bolts that attach to equipment he wouldn’t know how to run, a heap of stray wire that looks too heavy to manipulate by hand. By the time Chummy Foster spots him, he not only drives like Ray Blanchard, he feels like Ray Blanchard, entombed in the cab of a truck that reeks of all form of human futility and contains a welter of unreadable objects.

  He drives the sixteen miles to the place she has marked in his mind. A yellow property stake, a turnoff to a road that is no longer a road. He gets stuck once, twice, pushes the truck out of a shallow divot and then meets a deeper one in the gum
my terrain, pushing with all his will and crying out, then simply crying, unable to believe he has found himself at this unimaginable moment.

  The truck won’t budge. Ten feet from the plummeting edge of the quarry, the truck stalls willfully in place. He feels watched, senses Ray smirking just beyond sight in the murk of trees, arms folded high on his packed chest, a genie released from a bottle.

  He pushes again, feeling hairless, thin and mincing, ineffectual as a girl. The growl that comes from him then sounds both ancient and freshly ignited, wholly foreign; out it comes, aimed at the truck of Ray Blanchard, this immovable object, this stinking hunk of chrome and sheet metal with its clanking unreadable cargo, this infuriating machine whose every crack and rattle has for years existed as background sound and half-glimpsed motion, its throaty, gunning, gravel-spitting arrivals and departures enduring and everpresent, a scornful counterpoint to his own spinsterish comings and goings. Shame gives way to fury. He roars from low, low in his throat, drops his shoulder into the ass end of this clattering heap, and pushes hard enough to hear a muscle tear, but it moves, the thing moves, and his hatred moves with it, to the edge of the quarry, over the lip, into the dark and voiceless water.

  His rage subsides and sickness sets in. His child slumbers back at the rectory, amongst his doilies and padding cats, believing herself safe. He prays that tonight will not be a night of a nightmare, that she will not fling herself down the stairs and find him gone and Vivienne sitting in the parlor like a zombie in a clean housecoat and blood drying in her hair.

  It is not until he walks out to the road and faces the star-filled sky that he wonders how to walk the sixteen miles back to the rectory. Surely he will be seen. He can’t think, mired in the present tense as if in the throes of prayer, or sexual communion.

  Slow headlights appear down the road; he ducks into the trees. The car creeps to a stop and the lights flash, on and off, on and off. Pauline, in her red Firebird. He steps into the road, half hoping to be run over. They don’t speak until she pulls into the Blanchards’ driveway.