“For the love of Jesus, Murdeena, you can’t go walking around with no shoes!” her mother wails.
Murdeena makes her lips go thin and doesn’t ask her mother why, because she knows why just as well as Margaret-Ann does. But she’s stubborn.
“It’ll be all right. It’s not cold.”
“There’s broken glass all over the street!”
“Oh, Mother, there is not.”
“At least put on a pair of sandals,” Margaret-Ann calls, hoping for a compromise. She follows Murdeena to the door, because she’s leaving, she’s going out the door, she’s doing it. And she’s hurrying, too, because she knows if her mother gets hold of that windbreaker, she’ll yank her back inside.
“I won’t be long,” Murdeena calls, rushing down the porch steps.
Margaret-Ann stands on the porch, blinking some more. She thinks of Cullen Petrie sitting on his own front porch across the street, taking in the evening breeze.
Murdeena Morrisson has been parading all over town with no shoes on her feet, everyone says to everyone else. They marvel and chuckle together. They don’t know what she’s trying to prove, but it’s kind of cute. People will honk their horns at her as they go by and she’ll grin and wave, understanding. “You’re going to catch cold!” most of them yell, even though it’s the middle of summer. The only people who are kind of snotty about it are the teenagers, who are snotty to everyone anyway. They yell “hippie!” at her from their bikes, because they don’t know what else to yell at a person without shoes. Sometimes they’ll yell, “Didn’t you forget something at home?”
Murdeena hollers back: “Nope! Thanks for your concern!” She’s awfully good-natured, so nobody makes a fuss over it, to her face anyway. If that’s what she wants to do, that’s what she wants to do, they say, shaking their heads.
Margaret-Ann does her shopping with a scowl and nobody dares mention it to her. Murdeena won’t wear shoes at all any more. She’ll go flopping into the pharmacy or the seniors home or anywhere at all with her big, dirty feet. The Ladies Auxiliary held a lobster dinner the other night, and there Murdeena was as usual, bringing plates and cups of tea to the old ladies, and how anyone kept their appetites Margaret-Ann could not fathom. Murdeena stumbled with a teacup: “Don’t burn your tootsies, now, dear!” Laughter like gulls.
“I don’t want to hear another word about it!” Margaret-Ann announces one evening at the supper table. Murdeena looks up from her potatoes. She hasn’t said a thing.
It is obviously a signal to Ronald. He puts down his fork and sighs and dabs his lips with a paper napkin. “Well,” he says, searching for the right words. “What will you do in the winter? There’ll be snow on the ground.”
Margaret-Ann nods rapidly. Good sound logic.
Murdeena, still hunched over her plate — she’s been eating like a football player these days, but not putting on weight, as she tends to — suddenly grins at the two of them with startling love.
“I’ll put on boots when it’s wintertime!” she exclaims. “I haven’t gone crazy!” She goes to shovel in some potatoes but starts to laugh suddenly and they get sprayed across the table.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Murdeena!” complains her mother, getting up. “You’d think you were raised by savages.”
“That’s politically incorrect,” Ronald articulates carefully, having done nothing but watch television since his retirement.
“My arse,” Margaret-Ann articulates even more carefully. Murdeena continues to titter over her plate. This quiet glee coming off her lately is starting to wear on Margaret-Ann. Like she’s got some big secret tucked away that she’s going to spring on them at any moment, giving them instant triple heart attacks. “And what’s so Jesus funny inside that head of yours, anyway?” she stabs at Murdeena suddenly. “Walking around grinning like a monkey, like you’re playing some big trick on everybody, showing off those big ugly feet of yours.”
Offended, Murdeena peers beneath the table at them. “They’re not ugly.”
“They’re ugly as sin!”
“Since when?”
“Since you decided you wanted to start showing them off to the world!”
“Why should anybody care about seeing my feet?” queries Murdeena, purely bewildered.
“Exactly!” shoots back her mother. “Why should anyone care about seeing your feet!”
It ends there for a while.
She had always been the sweetest, most uncontentious little girl. Even as a baby, she never cried. As a child, never talked back. As a teenager, never sullen. She was their youngest and their best. Martin had driven drunk and had to go to AA or face jail, and Cora had gotten pregnant and then married and then divorced, and Alistair had failed grade nine. And all of them moved far away from home. But Murdeena never gave them any trouble at all. Agreeable was the word that best described Murdeena. She was always the most agreeable of children. Everybody thought so.
Gradually, however, she takes to speaking to Margaret-Ann like she believes her to be an idiot.
“Mother,” she says, slow and patient, “there’s things you don’t understand right now.”
“Mother,” she murmurs, smiling indulgently, “all will be explained.”
Margaret-Ann rams a taut, red fist into a swollen mound of bread dough. “Will you take your ‘mothers’ and stuff them up your hole, please, dear?”
“Ah, Mumma,” Murdeena shakes her head and wanders away smiling, her bare feet sticking to the kitchen linoleum. Margaret-Ann fires an oven mitt at her daughter’s backside, and feels around the counter for something more solid to follow it up with. She can’t stand to be condescended to by Murdeena. The world seems on its head. She can hear her in the living room with Ronald, solemnly advising him to turn off the TV and listen to her tell him something, and Ronald is trying to joke with her, and play round-and-round-the-garden-like-a-teddy-bear on her hand to make her laugh. She won’t give him her hand. Margaret-Ann can hear her daughter speaking quietly to her husband while he laughs and sings songs. Margaret-Ann feels dread. She goes to bed without asking Ronald what Murdeena had tried to say.
It is reported to Margaret-Ann later in the week. The folks at the seniors home were enjoying a slow and lovely traditional reel when the entertainer abruptly yanked her hands from the keys and slammed the piano shut. The loud wooden thunk echoed throughout the common room and the piano wires hummed suddenly in nervous unison. A couple of old folks yelped in surprise, and one who had been sleeping would have lurched forward out of his wheelchair if he hadn’t been strapped in.
“Murdeena, dear, are you trying to scare the poor old souls out of their skins?” gasped Sister Tina, the events organizer, and Margaret-Ann’s informant.
“There’s just so much to tell you all,” Murdeena reportedly answered, staring down at the shut piano, which looked like a mouth closed over its teeth. “And here I am playing reels!” She laughed to herself.
“Are you tired, dear?” Sister Tina asked in her little-girl’s voice, always calculated to be soothing and inoffensive to those around her. She moved carefully forward, using the same non-threatening gestures she approached the seniors with.
With unnerving spontaneity, Murdeena suddenly cried, “There’s so much news!”
“What’s wrong with her?” barked Eleanor Sullivan, who loved a good piano tune. “Get her a drink of rum!”
“Give her some slippers, her feet are cold,” slurred Angus Chisholm, groggy from being jolted out of his snooze.
“I have some good wool socks she can put on,” Mrs. Sullivan, the most alert and officious of the bunch of them, offered. “Run and get them for her, Sister, dear.” All of a sudden, all the seniors were offering to give Murdeena socks. A couple of them were beckoning for Sister Tina to come and help them off with their slippers — Murdeena obviously had more need of them than they did.
“I hav
en’t been able to feel my own goddamned feet in years,” Annie Chaisson was reasoning, struggling to kick off her pom-pommed knits.
“For the love of God, everyone keep your shoes on,” commanded Sister Tina. “You’ll all get the cold and there won’t be enough people to look after you!”
“I don’t need your footwear!” hollered Murdeena. “I need to be heard! I need to be believed and trusted and heard!”
It was an outlandishly earnest thing to say, and the old people looked everywhere but at the piano. Murdeena had swung around on the stool and was beaming at them. What came next was worse.
“I take it you’ve heard,” says Murdeena to her mother. She’d gone for a walk after her time with the seniors and stayed out for two and a half hours. Margaret-Ann stands in the middle of the kitchen, practically tapping her foot like a caricature of an angry, waiting mother. You would think Murdeena was a teenager who had been out carousing all night. Ronald is sitting at the kitchen table looking apprehensive because Margaret-Ann told him to and because he is.
“I take it you have something you’d like to say,” Margaret-Ann shoots back. “Your father tells me you’ve already said it to him. And now that you’ve said it to a bunch of senile incontinent old friggers, perhaps you can say it to your own mother.”
“All right,” says Murdeena, taking a breath. “Here she goes.”
“Let’s hear it, then,” says Margaret-Ann.
“I am the Way and the Light,” says Murdeena.
“What’s that now?”
“I am the Way and the Light,” says Murdeena.
“You are,” says Margaret-Ann.
“I am.”
“I see.”
Ronald covers the lower part of his face with his hands and looks from one woman to the other.
“Now what way and what light is that?” asks Margaret-Ann with her hands on her hips.
“What —?”
“What way and what light is it we’re talking about?”
Murdeena swallows and presses her lips together in that stubborn but uncertain way she has. “The way,” she says, “to heaven.”
Margaret-Ann looks to her husband, who shrugs.
“And the light,” continues Murdeena, “of — well, you know all this, Mother. I shouldn’t have to explain it.”
“Of?”
“Of salvation.”
Murdeena clears her throat to fill up the silence.
They are up all night arguing about it.
First of all, the arrogance. It is just plain arrogant to walk around thinking you are “the end-all and be-all,” as Margaret-Ann insisted on putting it. She would acknowledge it in no other terms.
“What you’re saying is you’re better than the rest of us,” was Margaret Ann’s argument.
“No, no!”
“You’re walking around talking like you know everything. No one’s going to stand for it.”
“Not everything,’’ said Murdeena. But she was smiling a little, you could tell she thought she was being modest.
“People aren’t going to stand for it,” Margaret-Ann repeated. “They’re going to say: ‘Murdeena Morrisson, who does she think she is?’”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Mumma!” burst Murdeena with uncharacteristic impatience. “Don’t you think back in Nazareth when Jesus — I mean me, when I was telling everyone in Nazareth . . . .”
Margaret-Ann covered her ears.
“ . . . about how I was the Way and the Light back then, don’t you think everyone was going around saying: ‘Humph! Jesus Christ! He must think he’s some good! Walking around, preaching at people.’”
“This is blasphemy,” hollered Margaret-Ann over the sound of blood pumping through her head. She was pressing against her ears too tightly.
“That’s what they said back then, too.”
Margaret-Ann was right and Murdeena was wrong. Nobody wanted to hear it. Everyone liked Murdeena, but she was taking her dirty bare feet and tromping all over their sacred ground. Word spread fast.
Pouring tea for Mrs. Fouguere in the church basement, she leans over to speak.
“Once upon a time, there was a little town on the water . . . ,” she begins.
“Oh, please, dear, not now,” Mrs. Fouguere interrupts, knowing by now what’s coming and everybody looking at her with pity.
“No, it’s okay,” says Murdeena, “I’m telling you a story.”
“I just want to drink my tea, Murdeena, love.”
“There was this whole town of people, you see . . . and they were all asleep! The whole town!”
“I don’t believe I care for this story, dear,” says Mrs. Fouguere.
“No, no, it’s a parable! Just wait,” Murdeena persists. “This whole town, they were all asleep, but the thing is . . . they were sleepwalking and going about their business just as if they were awake.”
“I don’t care to hear it, Murdeena.”
“Yes, for God’s sake, dear, go and have a little talk with the Father, if you want to talk,” Mrs. MacLaughlin, seated at the next table and known for her straightforward manner, speaks up.
“But it’s a parable!” explains Murdeena.
“It doesn’t sound like much of a friggin’ parable to me!” Mrs. MacLaughlin complains. The women nearby all grumble in agreement.
Murdeena straightens up and looks around at the room: “Well, I’m only starting to get the hang of it!”
The ladies look away from her. They take comfort, instead, in looking at each other — in their dresses and nylons and aggressive, desperate cosmetics. Someone snickers finally that it was certainly a long way from the Sermon on the Mount, and a demure wave of giggles ripples across the room. Murdeena puts her hands on her hips. Several of the ladies later remark on how like Margaret-Ann she appeared at that moment.
“To hell with you, then,” she declares, and flops from the room, bare feet glaring.
Murdeena has never been known to say anything like this to anyone before, certainly no one on the Ladies Auxiliary.
Sister Tina comes to the house for a visit.
“Seeing as I’m the Way and the Light,” Murdeena explains, “it would be wrong for me not to talk about it as often as possible.”
“Yes, but, dear, it wasn’t a very subtle story, was it? No one likes to hear that sort of thing about themselves.”
“The point isn’t for them to like it,” spits Murdeena. “They should just be quiet and listen to me.”
At this, Margaret-Ann leans back in her chair and caws. Sister Tina smiles a little, playing with the doily the teapot has been placed upon.
“They should,” the girl insists.
“They don’t agree with you, dear.”
“Then they can go to hell, like I said.”
“Wash your mouth out!” gasps her mother, furious but still half-laughing.
Sister Tina holds up her tiny hand with all the minute authority she possesses. “Now, that’s not a very Christian sentiment, is it Murdeena?”
“It’s as Christian as you can get,” Murdeena counters. Scandalously sure of herself.
The next day, the Sister brings the Father.
“I hate the way she talks to everyone now,’’ Margaret-Ann confides to him in the doorway. “She’s such a big know-it-all.” The Father nods knowingly and scratches his belly. The two of them, he and Murdeena, are left alone in the dining room so they can talk freely.
Crouched outside the door, Margaret-Ann hears Murdeena complain: “What are dining rooms for, anyway? We never even use this room. Everything’s covered in dust.’’
“It’s for good!” Margaret-Ann hollers in exasperation. Sister Tina gently guides her back into the kitchen.
The Father’s visit is basically useless. Afterwards he keeps remarking on how argumentative little Murdee
na has become. She would not be told. She simply will not be told, he keeps repeating. The Father has little idea how to deal with someone who will not be told. He makes it clear that his uselessness was therefore Murdeena’s own fault, and goes off to give Communion to the next-door neighbour, Allan Beaton, a shut-in.
“Everyone’s too old around here,” Murdeena mutters once the priest is gone. She’s watching him out the window as Allan Beaton’s nurse holds the door open to let him in. The nurse is no spring chicken herself. The Father is mostly bald with sparse, cotton-ball hair and a face like a crushed paper bag.
“You’re just full of complaints, these days,” her mother fumes, hauling a dust rag into the dining room.
So now Murdeena is going around thinking she can heal the sick. She figures that will shut them up. In the parking lot at the mall, Leanne Cameron accidentally slams her seven-year-old boy’s finger in the car door and Murdeena leaps from her mother’s Chevette and comes running up, bare feet burning against the asphalt, a big expectant grin splitting her face. This scaring the piss out of the little boy, who starts to scream at the sight of her, twice as loud as before. Murdeena tries and tries to grab the hand, but Leanne won’t let her anywhere near him. It is a scene that is witnessed and talked about. Margaret-Ann vows never to take Murdeena shopping with her again, or anywhere else, for that matter.
Margaret-Ann declares that she has officially “had it.” She experiments with giving Murdeena the silent treatment, but Murdeena is too preoccupied to notice. This hurts Margaret-Ann’s feelings, and so she stops experimenting and quits talking to her daughter altogether. Her days get angrier and quieter, as she waits for Murdeena to take notice of her mother and do the right thing. See to her.
“See to your mother,” Ronald pleads with her at night, lowering his voice so that the television will keep it from carrying into the kitchen. “Please go in and see to her.”
Murdeena’s head snaps up as if she had been asleep and someone had clapped their hands by her ear. “Did she hurt herself? Is she bleeding?” She wiggles her fingers eagerly, limbering up.
Great Cape Breton Storytelling Page 12