Ann-Marie MacDonald - Fall on Your Knees

One floor below, at the rear of the house, Lily is at her bedroom window watching the creek. Her lips are moving slightly as though whispering to someone down there, but there’s not a soul to be seen, just shimmering segments of the moon in the water. Across the hall, and directly beneath the attic window where Frances has just seated herself, James is sound asleep, dreaming plentifully, the way he has since Frances receded from his life. He is a little boy again, and it’s just he and his mother in a field of wildflowers. Mercedes is sleeping too, in her spare room, the whites of her brown eyes just showing in slits through nearly closed lids. She dreams of steel, of the colour grey, of skeins of grey hair on a loom.

Frances strokes Trixie in her lap and realizes she’s been followed home. She can see Boutros down there, though he can’t see her. He’s peering up, waiting for her candle to appear and warm the room. He’s staring at the windowpane, but all he can see there is the moon.

Frances hasn’t kept herself a technical virgin just to be raped by something the size of that — and why else did he follow me home? In her head is The Catholic Wife . Years ago she rifled Ralph Luvovitz’s room when they were all supposed to be playing Klesmer music downstairs, and robbed him of What Every Boy Should Know. The Catholic Wife was easier to come by but is much more complicated. A Catholic wife must keep a graph in her head at all times, plotting the ponderous journey of the ovum, stolid as an ice-breaker, to its point of intersection with a zillion speedboats. On average, there are six or seven days a month when this is fairly likely to happen, whereas the rest of the time it’s fairly likely not to happen. That’s the rhythm method. Like comedy, it’s about timing. Rhythm is a sin, of course, but only a venial one and sanctioned by the Holy Father in Rome, provided you are without lust when performing the generative act and not hoping not to get pregnant. (Unless you are performing the generative act in order to ward off your husband’s lust for another woman, in which case it is a sin for you to give in to his lust, but one mitigated by your intention of preventing him from committing a worse sin with a woman not his wife. Go to confession, you’re fine.) Every other type of birth control is a mortal sin for which you go directly to hell if unshriven at the hour of death.

Frances gets her period almost not at all but its scantiness is completely regular. Tonight is the first of the five or six probably fertile days. And this makes her shudder at the thought of Boutros loitering down there in the yard, because it’s bad enough thinking about him going up her, much less a chip off that massive block coming out her nine months from now. She’ll have to speed things up. She is irritated. Why did Ginger Taylor have to turn out to be a nice man?

“Coupla drunks jumped me outside Jameel’s.”

The third lie.

“Ow, Addy, easy!”

Adelaide picks out another wood splinter and jabs carbolic at Ginger’s chewed forehead. Luckily, that’s the strongest part of the skull. Lucky too that his nose and teeth only grazed gravel while his forehead took the railway tie. Luckiest of all was being lulled awake by the warm buzz of the steel rails beneath him in time to roll over and let the noon coal-train pass. Who’s his guardian angel?

“I want to know who she is and no bullshit.”

“What?” But it’s useless to pretend. Why did he for one second think she’d buy it? “She’s one of the Piper girls from New Waterford.”

Adelaide gets a chill, but she just nods and says, “Frances.” She knows the bad one is called Frances.

“I don’t know what she wants. I went after her last night but I got jumped before I could ask her, I don’t know by who or how many.”

Adelaide looks at him. Waiting for the rest.

“I’m sorry, Addy. I gave her a drive once, that’s all, I don’t know why I lied before.” He’s feeling suddenly tired. “She’s the little girl at the speak and I wanted to help her. I thought we could help her.”

Adelaide folds a soft white dressing for his brow. “There’s a lot of trouble in that family, Leo. That girl is not right in the head. She’ll see you in jail for rape.”

Ginger is shocked. “I would never, never —”

“The Pipers have money. You’re a coloured man, and that girl is after you.”

With the dressing round his head and his face scabbing over nicely, he knocks at the steel door.

“You want a fuckin raise, b’y, is that it?”

“No, Mr Jameel, I just quit, tell Piper I quit him too.”

“Tell him yourself.”

Ginger turns to leave, saying, “Then I guess he’ll find out when I don’t come for your order.” Ginger wants a wide berth between him and all things Piper.

“Fuckin nigger, get the fuck off my property — Boutros!”

Ginger is already leaving but he won’t run. He glances behind him to see the big son in the doorway. Ginger’s not scared of Boutros, despite the crack on the neck he got when he grabbed Jameel that time — the boy was just protecting his father. Ginger knows fellas like that are sooner pussycats than fighters.

“Fuckin nigger,” mutters Jameel. “Get the car, b’y,” to Boutros without looking at him.

“Daddy, I’m going to get married.”

Jameel wheels and swats Boutros across the face, “Get the fuckin car!”

That was around five o’clock.

“What kind of trouble?” Ginger asks.

Ginger knows the basic facts about the Pipers — what everyone knows and what he picked up driving to and from their house for years. Nowadays he hauls Piper’s booze, but that only ever takes him to the still in the woods and all Piper ever says is “Thank you, Leo, drive safe.”

But Adelaide knows what Teresa has told her. Teresa would never dream of telling such things to her little brother. Ginger was a sweet child, and keeping him from everything unpleasant is second nature to her. Besides, there are some things that are right to tell a woman friend, but otherwise indecent to repeat. Some things, when discussed with a dear husband or brother, are only poison. Good women discuss these things the way epidemiologists identify and track disease without alarming the public. This is woman’s work. Men are unfitted for it by nature and should be protected from it the same way women shouldn’t have to go down the mines. Men are so innocent.

“Tell me Addy.”

The time has come for inoculation. Adelaide takes a deep breath.

“The mother committed suicide. That was Mahmoud’s daughter, Materia, who ran off with Piper. Mahmoud disowned her. Their daughter, the one with the voice who you drove —”

“Kathleen —”

“She had a baby out of wedlock, the little crippled gal. Piper killed his daughter by not calling the doctor when she was dying in childbed. Pearleen Campbell works at Ferguson’s Funeral Parlour, she washed the body, there was a homemade cut in the belly, Pearleen and Teresa were girls together that’s how Teresa knows. Years ago, Teresa took a big cheque to Piper from old man Mahmoud. Next thing you know, the singer girl goes to New York City, meantime her mother’s in rags. The singer girl was a bitch. The mother died the day after her daughter was put in the ground, not a mark on her but her hair reeking of gas when they brought her to Ferguson’s. Teresa went to the mother’s funeral and saw the girl Frances laughing. That’s what I know, so God knows what else there is, or what that Frances girl was b’ought up with. She’s got a reason to be crazy, b’y, but that don’t make her innocent.”

That was after supper. Ginger had changed into his sun moon and stars shirt for the meal to mark his release from everything bad. Johnny-cake and molasses, beans and Cape Breton steak — take a pound and a half of baloney; slice it; now scorch it. A celebration, even though quitting the rum-running business means less money again. Ginger never realized how important the Mahmouds were to his family until Teresa lost her job, and Adelaide lost customers, and he lost most of the legitimate side of his trucking business. And now here goes the illegitimate side of her…. Things have been worse than usual for everyone lately; the Taylors have had it good by comparison. At least they have a future saved up for their kids. They can start living on that.