Wet snow blanketed the steps, and no one answered when Lucy knocked. A window was broken, an overcoat stuffed against it. A bottle rolled as she let herself in; she could see her breath. “Lily?” Her call was met by a groan from the room where kids had fought at Artie’s wake, Lil’s sunken eyes peering up from above the filthy quilt. “Look what the cat’s drug in. What the Jesus do you want?” she’d slurred bitterly, asking if Lucy’s hubby had sent her, or what? The stink was awful: sickness and rot. As Lucy set the parcels down, Lil grabbed at her, her fingers half-frozen. How much easier to have pried them away, and run. “Nobody home,” she could’ve lied; but the priest’s voice intervened: You win hearts by feeding stomachs. Winning hearts for Christ is the reward.
Picking at some turkey, Lil had retched, vomit decorating the quilt. Mocking her for being “a good sport” and calling Harry “one lucky bastard, a darlin’,” saying they deserved each other, he and Lucy. She’d wiped her mouth, staring at the peeling wallpaper, and accused him of being timid. “Got the balls of a hamster,” she laughed raggedly. “Wouldn’t know what to do if a woman come up and bit him on the arse!” Lucy’d wanted to spit, but then Lil had said, “But you now, Missus, far’s he’s concerned, the sun sets on yours,” and that the last thing anyone needed was charity and Lucy’s type coming around. “Fish stinks after a while,” she’d choked, “so git.” Lucy didn’t stop to slide the plate into the icebox, leaving the shoebox on the floor. Feeling sick, she’d hurried through the slush, then thought of the daughter. She’d phone her at work, what anyone would do under the circumstances. No matter what, Lil was her mother. Like mother, like daughter? But when she got home, a letter was waiting, the postmark illegible, but she’d have known the writing anywhere.
Dear Ma,
Landed o.k. in **** hours crossing, sick as a dog, no sealegs till ****. Nice digs though. Nice view from ****, as you can see in the snaps, looks a bit like ****. Ha ha. Why go far when anything a guy could want is in his own **** . Well. Got to march. So long for ****, say hi to dad & don’t worry, be seeing youse.
Yours truly, J xox
Shaking the empty envelope, frantically she checked inside. If he’d sent pictures, they were long gone.
1944
THAT SPRING AN OBIT RAN in the Herald: Lily Jean Marryatt. Forty-eight years old, daughter of the late Erma; survived by…no visitation, by request. Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling, calling oh sinner come home. Harry’s step lightened, somehow. Not long after, she was getting breakfast when the paper thwacked the step; the boy had a habit of winging it. Normandy Invaded! the headline blared. The eggs going cold, Harry’d gripped her shoulder, mumbling that since they hadn’t heard otherwise, things had to be all right. If not, wouldn’t they know?
Time had hummed then like the wires, a buzzing dread that woke her at night and made her clammy. Once, in the wee hours she’d found Harry on the porch in his pajamas. He had an appointment at the eye doctor’s next morning for a cleaning and polishing. In the moonlight his good eye had looked wet, and he’d muttered about feeling poorly, and why bother? An eye or a Victrola, what did anything matter, when your boy was absent? Neither had been able to say missing.
Then she’d dreamed of Jewel stopping by a river, water flowing green and opaque. Squatting on a rock, he’d splashed his face, then peeled off his uniform like a skin. A shield of lindens towered all around. Something black and white drifted by, a cow, and a uniform with red on the sleeve. He turned sharply, and it was as if she were there, too. Looking her in the eye, he opened his mouth: “Hey, Ma!” As she waved, an arm moved behind him, a helmet like a potty. Below its brim the Jerry’s face bore a mark. A tattoo: three blue upside-down commas. The face was Franz Heinemann’s. As the bayonet lifted, she tried to scream, tried to move her arm, but it was wooden. Somehow Jewel turned, his boot sinking in mud, and a scuffle started.
Not the water, she tried to warn him, but no sound would come out. The Jerry drove his bayonet—the movement slow as salt threading through an egg timer—but Jewel slid and spun. They were Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone, Robin Hood and Guy of Gisbourne, sword-fighting, thrusting, parrying. Suddenly Jewel was a little boy, and the Jerry lurched. A triangle of blood blooming in his chest, and his face becoming rock, and as he gave one last thrust, lunging, his soleless boot skidded. Curling life into his fist—like the workings of a watch: first steps, words, day at school, that run-in with the Mounties, and his look on the jetty that drizzly day—Jewel blindsided the blond-stubbled jaw, sent the man reeling into the silent current.
A teenage girl with a face like hers and dandelions in her hair hid like a frog in the rushes, and let out a croak. As the enemy thrashed, Jewel thrust his bayonet. Heinemann’s mouth opened, gasping, and in the dream she could see inside—the pink surprise of a tongue—and even understand. Hilfen mich? Useless syllables dangling over the river as it netted him. One last glimpse before his clothes pulled him under: his face was another child’s, the Slauenwhite boy’s. The helmet spinning away a tortoise shell. The tortoise and the hare, as the fellow bobbed a final time, the air knit with spray.
A yellow wind stirred the reeds as the river sucked, and overhead a bird tweeted. Wir kampfen bis wir siegen? Somehow it made sense: we fight till we win. Picking up his shirt and boots, turning his back, Jewel slipped through the lindens, and she was the bird watching over as he ran.
The next morning, as soon as she woke she wrote to him, quoting the twenty-first Psalm: The Lord is thy shepherd, don’t forget. She omitted the part about the valley in the shadow of death, launching instead into his father’s activities. He’s considering a new accordion; maybe the fiddle fever is waning? The notion had given her a tiny jolt of pleasure. When we met, he was quite the musician—before his fiddling, and raising Cain, ha ha! Humming Vera Lynn, she’d crossed out that last bit, trying not to imagine him lying in a trench, or wading through gunfire. Our Father, she’d whispered, sealing the envelope before Harry appeared, rosining his bow.
Posting the letter was like plugging her nose and jumping off a rock. She’d imagined it riding the sea in a convoy, a candy heart in the belly of a destroyer. Crossing paths with one from him somewhere in mid-Atlantic, surviving wolf packs and waves.
1945
THEN, ONE FREEZING MARCH DAY, a letter had arrived for Harry, postmarked Delmenhorst. Delmenhorst? Resisting the urge to open it, she’d called him at work and he had her read it over the phone.
Dear Dad,
Up to my knees in blood shit & corruption. Bremen, you know: the place with musicians? Put the boots to Jerry, sleeping outside all winter. Ma’s chocolate bars are great, the boys trade for smokes. You’d think you hit the jackpot here, cellars full of cash. Arse wipe’s about it. They say the Jerries are whupped. Tell Ma I dream about her pie. Guess what passes for coffee? Weeds by the road. Went to some fella’s house and his wife brewed some up. The Jerries are done for.
Your son always, Jewel
Father Marcus’s eyes were grave but detached as he pressed the host to her tongue that Sunday. Corpus Christi. A tiny, perfect moon, sticky as a postage stamp. The bread of heaven. She’d let it melt on her palate. Blood of Christ, shed for you. Then Mrs. Slauenwhite had corralled her; they were starting early on the raffle, looking for donations. The prize was a quilt embroidered with the names of all the parish boys who’d enlisted, every wife and mother asked to do a square on a sugar bag, a precious item given rationing. Naturally, Lucy’d squirrelled some away. Busy hands mend busy minds.
She was pressing open a seam when the bell rang. Standing there in his cap, the man asked how she was doing. The sky had swayed as he held out the telegram. She shook her head, the iron hissing behind her. “Harry?” she’d called out feebly. But Harry was at work, of course, welding plates to a hull with a hole in it big enough to drive a truck through. Harry? “Sorry?” The man had kept his eyes on her apron, asking if she was Mrs. Caines.
Woun
ded in action, Jewel was shipped to a hospital in England, they eventually learned. A clean place with good light, said his note. His writing not so different-looking. My luck ran out, was how he put it. All I seen were trees like torches, then a flash. Any lower, and I’d be singing soprano, any higher, and…Sorry for the bad news. Shrapnel. I’ll make it, dont worry. Others didn’t, though. I love you Ma, he signed off, J. Harry’d read it breathing over her shoulder, needing a drink. Impossible to tell if the sound he made was laughing or crying. Swigging, swallowing. “Jesus Christ,” he’d said, muttering about what the fathers of girls didn’t know.
They were both there to see the ship dock, fewer than a dozen people waiting in the spitting April rain. In a throng she mightn’t have recognized him. Stooped, craggy-faced, he’d almost walked right by. She was wearing a new coat, mauve, a bit of an old ladies’ colour. Harry had on a suit and tie, his neck bulging. His bad eye had developed a permanent squint, as if the lid were sick of pretending to be useful. In the five years, four months, and six days since she’d kissed Jewel goodbye, her hair had gone the shade of weathered shingles. He’d looked confused when she grabbed his sleeve.
She could almost circle his waist with one arm, clinging to him. Wincing, he pulled back at first, till Harry pressed in and, swear on everything holy, kissed him. The rain a thousand pinches. He’d limped to the car, an arm around each of them, peering about nervously at every honk and rumble. Gripping his father’s arm, getting into the front seat. A small torture it had been sitting behind him the short ride home, braving his sideward glances. Holy Mary, Mother of God, she’d prayed. Driving in silence, they’d passed sailors beating someone up in broad daylight. She’d thought of Jewel’s wound, the strafing he’d survived—by grace?—as Harry asked if he could guess what she’d baked. Covering his eyes, Jewel just shrugged; and all her waiting was a knife in her side—Stabat mater dolorosa—even as she imagined angels singing. When she gripped his shoulder, through the dank wool he felt warm and solid: more than she could’ve hoped for. “A Ritz pie,” Harry’d brayed—apple made of crackers. “Beat that, eh?”
15
“PILL TIME, HARRY.” JUGGLING THE straw and a glass of water, she takes the last blue tablet from the plastic case—a slot for each day of the week: Rebecca’s idea, which couldn’t’ve come sooner. It’s like a sewing box, spaces for pins, needles, hooks, eyes. “Open up, now.” It reminds her of giving a cat a pill, the moth-eaten tom that had adopted them once, briefly. Stroking Harry’s forehead, she holds his chin gently, then pinches his jaws open; she’s about to pop the pill down his gullet when he coughs. It flies from her fingers, a dot that goes instantly microscopic. Has he swallowed it? He rubs his head back and forth against the pillow. Even after just a couple of weeks, it’s impossible to hold back the exasperation. “For heaven’s sake!”
Finding her glasses, on hands and knees she scours the floor. Too late to call the drugstore, even if they do deliveries. It’s for his blood pressure—or is it thyroid? Lordie, the vials lined up on the dresser, and still more in the kitchen. So hard to keep track, which makes Rebecca’s brainwave appreciated.
Harry gurgles something, his hand dangling, pointing? Pain shoots through her knees as if she’s crawling on spikes. Peering under the bed skirt, she thinks of Father Langille in his flashy socks, and his favourite parable. The one about the poor lady turning her house upside down searching for missing coins. So God turns us upside down, till all the lost are found. The new priest has a habit of slapping the pulpit, making his points.
“Luschee?” Harry starts to cry, that thick, rattling sound deep in his chest, like walking pneumonia. She’d been warned of these emotional spasms, outbursts. Two weeks, and they’ve been daily events, not much different from a toddler’s going through the terrible twos. “Mood swings,” Rebecca says, always the expert.
Searching every inch of floor and coming up empty-handed, she feels like one of those dames in the Bible: Sarah, maybe, at age one hundred or whatever giving birth. Not just ancient, but feeble. Feeble-minded. The crying makes her want to draw up her knees and weep into her hands. Don’t be a martyr, now—how many times has she heard that? It used to come from Harry, now it’s from Rebecca and Jewel. They’re full of suggestions, advice, but they don’t know. They have no idea. What’s a martyr, anyway? As if Joan of Arc asked to be burned at the stake, and her very own namesake, St. Lucy, blinded. The saint of light, her pretty eyes gouged out by her own hand to spite an unworthy suitor. I renounce you, vanity! Get lost! Imagine. No, caring for someone is nothing like that. If she must think of saints, which old Father Marcus used to relentlessly, better to think of the less flamboyant and not the crazies, as Harry would put it. The ones like Jude, maybe—and Helena, it strikes her, the thought of her daughter’s name a ghost creeping in and tapping her on the shoulder. Helena, the patron saint of converts and divorce; now that had given Father Marcus pause.
But enough foolishness; she’s got to find that pill. “Where the hell is it?” she hears herself rasp, and suddenly the room swims, and there’s a swarming dizziness. The thought of everything lost rushing in, despair foaming on the surface. Good God, is she having a stroke? An episode, she imagines Rebecca pronouncing, if she were here looking down at her; if she were so lucky. But then a voice inside intervenes, a voice like a priest’s, a hybrid of the old and the new—The Lord is patient and steadfast in mercy—and in a queer flash she pictures a monk with hair like that bossy Stooge, in a brown robe and striped socks. She really is going loony. Okay, so be merciful, and just take me now. But then a tiny, hard nub rolls under her fingertip. There!
Scrambling back up, dusting it off, she pries open Harry’s mouth and pushes the pill down his throat, clamping his jaw shut so this time it can’t escape. He chokes and sputters, that eye of his sharp with resentment, maybe even fear. When the spasm passes, dutifully, childlike, he takes a sip of water. “Okay? All set now?” she pants wearily. Gently, guiltily, she sponges his face, swallowing back the lump in her throat. At last she can say, the way a mom would to a little kid, exhausted but mustering brightness, “All right now, dear. Lights out.” But, bringing his hand up, he taps his lips with two shaky fingers. The gesture as cruel as a poke to the back of her knees. “What now?” Instantly she regrets her sharpness. Two weeks at home and barely a drop of beer or a whiff of tobacco, well, except what he can breathe in off Jewel. Oh, God, the guilt.
Tucking Harry’s hand beneath the sheet, she kisses his brow; in what way isn’t she his mother? “You know what the doctor says,” she reminds him: no alcohol and no smoking. They haven’t exactly been sticklers. But if anyone’s broken the rules, it’s Rebecca; she started offering him puffs now and then. As with a kid, once one gives in, it’s hard to stop. That very afternoon, so help them all, Lucy’d lit a cigarette herself, her tongue curling at the taste, and held it to his mouth: a pacifier. “What’s the good of living if you can’t enjoy it?” Rebecca had a point. Though Harry coughed so hard he spat up, and after all that, refused to nap. “There’s something worth staying awake for, eh, Pop?” His cigarettes, she’d meant.
Discipline, she tells herself; she needs to take charge. “TV off, now, dear,” she says stiffly, bustling around the foot of the bed. The volume’s already low, and there’s just the flickering screen; who cares what’s on? But when she goes to press the button, he shakes his head stubbornly. Since Jewel brought the set upstairs, it’s become Harry’s best friend; he hates being left. You can’t function, Ma, without sleep, Jewel’s voice comes back to her, the same voice that says martyr. For the love of Dinah, so what if the tube’s left on all night, if it keeps him company?
Jewel’s old room has become a magnet for every household item that lacks a proper spot, so she feels right at home in it. After that first night with Harry back, she knew she’d never get another night’s sleep sharing his bed. Tugging on her nightie, she barely sees the clutter—the wheelchair piled with pads and rub
ber gloves for the nurse who visits him weekly, the walker, her knitting and the sewing machine gathering dust. The little bed creaks when she falls into it; who knows when the sheets were last changed. For an instant the bluish flicker in the hallway alarms her, conjuring a fire, an emergency of some kind. But then the faint trill of TV laughter drifts in, and all too soon, Harry’s moans, that dreadful, choked sobbing. Yes, yes, he is still there inside that useless body—somewhere, more’s the pity, she thinks at times.
Tumbling down into that limbo between sleep and waking, she imagines Rebecca marching in absurdly, ordering in a voice like the one that comes on when a program’s disrupted, Do not adjust your set, then messing with the rabbit ears. She even imagines arguing with her. But everyone needs a reason to get up, Rebecca’s imagined voice harps vaguely. But, dear, something inside Lucy that’s louder and stronger gets the last word, harping right back, there’s a lot worse than not waking or getting up.
If she lies still enough, the voices trickle away. But as they do, exhaustion replaces them, and she almost wishes her soul would leak out and evaporate into the drafty gloom. You must die in Christ—she imagines that hybrid monk again with a pigeon on his shoulder; a mimic of St. Francis?—all ye who seek freedom. Oblivion would do just fine, thank you. But next her brain’s a circus mirror, Harry’s reflection bending and stretching, blooming and folding as the world flashes by. At last, drifting towards a grainy peace, she thinks—dreams—of Robert. The two of them, Robert and his Grandmother Frog, off to the midway. The only one patient enough to stand at the sticky sidelines, she watches him ride the bumper cars. Cheeks sugared pink, he’s ten years old, his brush-cut noggin snapping back and forth with each jerk. Just one more ride, Gran—please, pleeease?
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