Ann-Marie MacDonald - Fall on Your Knees

Back upstairs, he drags her mattress into the nursery room, where Frances and Mercedes sleep curled in their crib. Kathleen looks down at her sisters and feels her first rush of love for them, sweet bundles of babies’ breath and milky dreams. She leans down to kiss them. When she rises, a lock of her hair is twined in Frances’s fist. Gently she opens the tiny hand and tucks it under the covers.

Kathleen snuggles into her own bed on the floor and says to her father, “Don’t go.”

James says, “I’ll be right here,” and places his chair near the door, where he watches her till she falls asleep. Then he goes back to his own room and locks the door.

The next day, James outsmarts the demon for the second time. He enlists.

When James tells Materia that he has enlisted, she makes the sign of the cross. Oh no, he thinks, and tells her firmly, “It’s no good asking me not to go, I’ve already joined up.” She goes straight to church. James shakes his head. She might as well pray to the Kaiser for all the good it’ll do. He’s going, it’s done.

Materia arrives at Mount Carmel and hurries over to Mary’s grotto. There she prostrates herself as best she can, what with her unborn cargo, and gives thanks to Our Lady for sending The War.

James decides it can’t do any harm to carry a photo of Kathleen with him to the war. He gets one of Wheeler’s boys to come out to New Waterford. He wants to remember her in her own home setting, not in a corpse-like tableau against a backdrop of faux antiquity. Lifelike. Like her.

After school on August 7, Wheeler’s assistant arrives with his contraption piled in Leo Taylor’s buggy, between himself and Kathleen.

“Set ’er up out here,” says James, “in front of the house, it’s such a beautiful day.”

The photographer peers through the circle of his thumb and forefinger at Kathleen standing motionless on the veranda with her hands folded and her feet in fifth position.

“That’s lovely, Miss Piper, just lovely.”

As Taylor unloads the buggy, James comes up and tells him quietly, “From now on, Taylor, any male passengers ride up front with you.”

“Yes sir.”

Taylor carries the boxy camera across the yard, its long hood trailing “like the severed head of a nun,” thinks Kathleen, pleased with her own ghoulishness. The photographer arcs around her, finding just the right angle, as Taylor follows with the equipment. Kathleen is still in her Holy Angels uniform. James has told her not to bother changing.

“Beautiful, now just hold that pose, Miss Piper.”

The photographer spears the tripod into the earth and disappears under the camera skirts. Taylor tilts a large black card above the lens. Everyone waits. Kathleen doesn’t move a muscle until snap .

“Miss Piper, I’m afraid I must ask you to remain still.”

“Sorry, I didn’t know you were going to take it.”

“Do you need to stretch again?”

“No.”

Kathleen folds her hands once more and smiles. The photographer cranks the lens for what seems like for ever. Kathleen mutters out the corner of her mouth, “Take the picture,” just as snap —

“Miss Piper, please.”

“Sorry, I’m sorry, I won’t move this time.”

Demure smile, eyes turning glassy, an eternity passes; her mind wanders, she pictures the geography teacher, Sister Saint Monica, without her veil, is she bald underneath? Do nuns go to the toilet? Kathleen scratches her nose just as snap .

The photographer pops his head out from under the hood, “It’s not a motion camera, Miss Piper.”

James catches Kathleen’s eye and winks. She grins. The photographer huddles once more behind the camera, “That’s nice, Miss Piper, that’s lovely, one … two … three….”

James sneaks up behind the camera and pulls a cross-eyed face at Kathleen. She flops forward, hands on her knees, laughing into the camera, “Daddy!” — while at the same instant Materia appears in the window behind her and waves — snap . Through the lens, Materia’s hand fractures into light, framing Kathleen’s blur of hair. Materia must be holding something shiny.

“I give up!” The photographer collapses his tripod. “You don’t have to pay me, Mr Piper, except for the fillum, I got exactly nothing.”

“Print up the last one, b’y, I’ll pay you.”

Leo Taylor packs the equipment back into his buggy. He’s a bit surprised. He has never seen Mr Piper anything but stern. Leo has always sensed something about Mr Piper — the thing you sense about certain dogs. Best to avoid their eye, don’t make them nervous with sudden moves. And yet here’s Mr Piper, high-jinksing with his daughter just as though he were her brother or her beau.

James and Kathleen are still laughing as the buggy rolls off in a cloud of sepia and Materia raps on the window with the scissors.

“Supper,” says James.

“What’re we having?” Kathleen asks.

“Steak and kidney pie.”

“Yuck.”

He ruffles her head and they go inside.

The child was not right from the start. First of all, it hardly cried. Made a sound like a little wet kitten. So maybe it was just as well. The tragic part was that neither Materia nor James nor even Mrs Luvovitz knew to baptize it in time; how could they? There was nothing out and out wrong with it, it was even a big child. Full term, born the day after Kathleen got her picture taken. Did Materia weaken it when she prostrated herself at the plaster feet of Mary a few days ago? Seems fanciful to think so. And a tad blasphemous. No, it was a big child with a good strong heartbeat and it lived three days, then died, no one knows why. Crib death. It just happens, children stop, why? It’s a mystery. As though they arrive, look around with their little blind eyes and decide not to stay.

Materia had called it Lily but it can’t be said to have been truly named; it was unbaptized and therefore no one, and therefore incinerated. James took it, wrapped in a sheet inside an orange crate — he was a little dazed — to the double company house on King Street that served as a hospital.

Burial was not an option. Mourning was not an option. This was the other Lily, before the Lily who would live to be twice baptized, as though to make up for the first. Other Lily.

What you do after a baby like this is get over it. Don’t mope, it wasn’t meant to be. Don’t pray, prayers don’t reach limbo. Have faith, God had a reason. To test you, most likely. God never sends us more than we can bear. Offer it up. Keep in mind it was another girl.

Materia gets on with it. Cleans the house in the night, bumping and scouring from pool to pool of kerosene light till the dawn reeks of lye and she begins to bake and bake and bake. Who’s going to eat all this? She takes it over to the Luvovitzes; Abe and Rudy are teenagers now, big boys with bottomless stomachs. Materia loves to watch them eat — beautiful healthy boys, winking at their mother, towering over her, devoted to her. Good sons.

Mercedes and Frances are disappointed. Bewildered. Their new sister was there and then she wasn’t. Kathleen is angry; babies shouldn’t die.

“Well, what was wrong with it?”

“We don’t know,” says James.

“That’s a stupid rotten answer.”

“Life is sometimes rotten and stupid.” James prides himself on always telling her the truth.

“Not for me it won’t be.”

“No, not for you.”

What upsets Kathleen most is the blank face on her mother. A baby factory. Insensate. My life will not be like that.

James doesn’t dwell on it. He feels sorry for the thing, but it’s just as well not to have another mouth to feed. And Materia has bounced back remarkably. Like a heifer. He tries not to think it. Trouble is, she still looks pregnant. She’ll be slim again by the time I get back from the war.