Ann-Marie MacDonald - Fall on Your Knees

But what has she to be sorry for? A body doesn’t need a reason to feel sorry. Sorry is a free-floating commodity.

“I love you,” says Rose.

“I know.”

“Never leave you.”

“It’s okay.”

“Kathleen.”

The word becomes a keening and Rose crumples in agony at the extraction of that last mortal shard. It’s the one that hurts the worst, she tried to leave it where it was so it could kill her slow and numb, that last lethal fragment. Her name.

Lily guides Rose to the floor retching, past crying, until finally she begins to rock on her heels.

“It’s okay. It’s all right now, Rose.”

And Rose takes her first unfettered breath.

Lily has made tea. She pours some hot into Rose’s cup and asks, “Why didn’t you save her?”

Rose could retreat to her usual safe cynical distance, but at this moment she can’t remember what she ever had to lose or gain. She answers the question.

“I wrote and my letters came back unopened. I figured to hell with her. That’s ’cause I wanted to think she was the one sending them back. I couldn’t believe anyone could lock her up. Even though I’d seen her father.”

Lily doesn’t ask.

Rose stirs and stirs her tea, looking down until she picks up the thread again. “She always did what she wanted, you see. That was the great thing. It was better to think she was finished with me than to think anything could get the better of her. I thought, give her a couple months, she’ll be back — her brilliant career, you know. She could quit me but not her music….” Rose looks up. “But she didn’t come back. By the time I got money for a train ticket to that what the hell island —”

“Cape Breton.”

“Yeah,” smiling, “‘C’Bre’n’ — Giles found me and told me she was dead. Never said nothing ’bout babies. Said flu.”

Rose looks out the window at a line of small clothes. Lily says, “You could’ve walked.”

“Yeah. I could’ve walked.”

They sit in silence for a bit. Then Lily asks, “What’s the date today?”

“I don’t know. June something — twenty-first. No, twentieth.”

“It’s my birthday.”

Rose squeezes shut her eyes for a moment. Then opens them. Her voice is kind when she speaks. “Happy birthday, Lily.”

“I’m supposed to be at Lourdes.”

“You don’t say.”

There’s a charcoal fedora with an emerald band hanging from a hook on the back of the door. Lily goes and gets it and hands it to Rose.

“Would you play me something?”

Rose sets the hat beside her on the bench, and plays.

When there is finally more silence than music, Lily looks up and says, “Thank you.”

Rose returns to her cold tea and watches as Lily unbuckles her brace, pulls off her boots and turns them upside-down on the table. A wadded heap: when the maple leaves wore out, Lily lined the sole of her left boot with newspaper photos of President Roosevelt because she trusted him, and reinforced her right sole with promises of “a new deal”. The rest of the wrinkled papers on the table bear the likeness of King George V, which is why it takes Rose a moment to register the fact of three thousand dollars in hundreds.

“What do you figure it’s worth in American money?” asks Lily.

“Where the hell’d you get this, child?”

Lily answers, “My sister Frances.”

Rose nods and smiles and says, “Everybody should have a sister Frances.”

The beautiful colour print of Bernadette and Our Lady of Lourdes has been nicely framed. It hangs over the blackboard in Mercedes’ classroom at Mount Carmel High School. Mercedes never tires of telling the wonderful story of Bernadette, nor does she let many weeks go by without quizzing the class at random — “And how many times did Our Lady appear to Bernadette?” Bernadette is a saint now. She was canonized on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, 1933 — the year Lily went away. “And what did Our Lady answer when Bernadette asked, ‘Who are you?’”

Mercedes stands ramrod-straight on her platform at the front of the class, anticipating the forties in her economy of line and preference for angles. April 1939.

“What’s wrong with this sentence?”

She raps the blackboard with her pointer, taut hickory, parade-square quality. Chalked in her textbook longhand: Do like your mother says .

Her grade tens. Seventeen of them. God knows there’ll be few enough by the time they hit grade twelve, and likely not a single boy among the graduating class. Only three left now. One of them, Bernie “Moose” Muise, shoots up his hand. Mercedes casts a withering eye and purses her lips, unaware that this has made her an easy school yard take-off. Who am I? Old leather-lips!

“Well, Bernard?”

“See miss, it’s like this: if every girl did like her mother said, the population of Cape Breton Island would be cut in half.”

A burst of laughter bitten off and swallowed short by the class. Nervous titters as Mercedes strolls to the big boy’s desk — he’s grinning, actually kinda fond of old leather-lips. The blows rain down on him hard and fast, a hickory blur, before he can get his arms over his head he’s bleeding from an eye, occasioning a new nickname.

“You need a bit of a rest, Mercedes.”

“Yes, Sister Saint Eustace.”

“Perhaps a brief change of scene.”

“I have friends in Halifax.”

Halifax County.

“Anthony, come here please.”

The matron at the Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children waits with her hands folded as the little boy throws a last clutch of grain to the hens. This is Mercedes’ first trip to the mainland. She stands next to the matron. The little boy wears a red checkered shirt and brown corduroy pants with suspenders, sturdy boots. He looks healthy. The matron picks a little straw from his hair and says, “Anthony, this is Miss Piper.”

The little boy looks down, on the bashful side, and says, “… Hello.”

“Hello, Miss Piper,” prompts the matron.

“Hello, Miss Piper.”

Mercedes waits till he looks up. Then she begins: “‘Who made the world?’”

He hesitates, parts his lips, then, “‘God made the world.’”

“‘Who is God?’”

“‘God is the Creator of heaven and earth and of all things.’”

“‘What is man?’”

“‘Man is a creature composed of body and soul and made to the image and likeness of God.’”

“Why did God make you?”

“‘God made me to know Him to love Him and serve —’”

“‘— and to serve —’”

“‘— and to serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him for ever in heaven.’”

“‘What must we do to save our souls?’”

“‘To save our souls we must worship God by faith hope and charity that is we must believe in Him hope in Him and love Him with all our hearts.’”

“‘— heart.’”

“‘— heart.’”

Mercedes nods. “That is all. You may go, Anthony.”

The little boy watches as Mercedes turns to walk away with the matron, then he stops her with a question. “Are you the nice lady?”

Mercedes turns back, at a loss. The matron helps. “The nice lady who sent you here and makes sure you have clothes and food? Yes.”

Mercedes remains expressionless. Anthony says, “Thank you, Miss Piper.”

And scoots, tickled and shy, back to the chickens.

“Lovely farm,” says Mercedes to the matron.

“Come, I’ll show you the school section.”

Mercedes arranged for Anthony to be sent here before he was born. The first Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children blew up along with half of Halifax in 1917, but they built another one out on the Preston Road. Mercedes did not expect Anthony to grow up as a charity child, even though this is a charity organization courtesy of the African United Baptist Association — some of the best women you’d ever want to meet on the Ladies’ Auxiliary. There are even music classes. Anthony is learning violin. Mercedes pays for him out of the Lourdes money, asking only that he be raised a Catholic. The Baptist ladies have been as good as their word, as Mercedes ascertained just now.