Ann-Marie MacDonald - Fall on Your Knees

The stroke itself was actually a pleasant, if strange, experience. It happened after he torched the still in the woods that day of the disasters four months ago.

James soaked the still in gasoline, lit it and ran. The thing blew sky-high, which is why the young Mountie found little more than smouldering earth. Perhaps it was the boom that triggered James’s stroke — set a delicate patch of artery wall to trembling till it caved in and flooded a small surrounding area of his brain. Neurons drowned.

When he awoke, he was disoriented as to time. He noted the sun was in the same place as it had been when he ran and dove from the explosion. He got up and walked a few steps before the new imbalance of his body caught up with him and he fell to the left.

James had plenty of reasons to feel dizzy at that particular moment, considering all he’d recently been through. The idea that he might have had a small stroke would have seemed absurd to him. Overkill. He picked himself up and walked carefully from tree to tree until he reached the exploded fringe of the clearing, then he got down and crawled to the blackened spot on the ground where his industry had been. It was cold. That was how he knew at least twenty-four hours had passed.

He fell asleep. Or passed out. He opened his eyes next on a sky full of stars and a high new moon. For a moment he had no past. He was no one, no man. He was the clear night air. The next instant, however, he was a pit full of memory. Corroded shapes of used-to-be things, now twisted beyond recognition. He got onto his hands and knees, his head a wrecking ball, blind with pain. Molten glue sludging through the veins of his left side where his blood should flow. The right side of him had its first taste of dragging the left side like a wounded comrade as he struggled to his feet and, with his right hand, gripped a tattered sapling for support. He stayed there long enough for the sap to fuse his hand to the slender trunk and he left a layer of skin behind when he freed himself and staggered on.

He dropped carefully to his knees every so often when gravity got the better of his new inner-ear alignment. He’d hang his head to let a fresh wave of blood assault his brain. It hurt like hell but it was the only way to avoid fainting. Sometimes he’d fall farther with the weight of his head, from his knees onto his hands, his left hand failing to open on impact, taking the stony earth on bare knuckles. After this moment’s rest, the healthy soldier would lift the wounded one back up and continue the next few yards, the right palm seeping blood, the left hand torn at the knuckles.

His car was a hundred yards from the site of the still. He had covered twenty-five when dawn broke. Then he slept. Or passed out.

But the stroke itself was blissful. He had a dream, only more so. He saw his mother. He was a grown man just as he is now:

As in other dreams of her, she is accompanied by distant but everywhere music. An old-fashioned tune on the piano, ineffably sweet and full of meaning, unnameable and yet as familiar as the beating of his own heart. He knows his mother is in the music. His tears well up and fall, refreshing him. He is in a clearing of bright green woods. Not pine, not dark like around here, but old deciduous growth, tall and embracing. There is a birch tree among the oaks and elms. He knows this is his mother. He looks at the white bark of the tree and recognizes her dress.

He lies down, curled beneath the birch, and he hears her voice, Hello . He knows that if he turns to look into her face she will go away, so he concentrates on a blade of grass before his eyes, and she speaks to him, calling him by his Gaelic name, Hello, Seamus. Mo ghraidh. M’eudail . His tears soothe his face, parched to kindling.

He speaks to her. He tells her he is sorry. He feels her hand, cool on the side of his face. He knows she is healing him, but he also realizes that with this she is preparing to send him away from her, “No!” He feels she is condemning him back to a hell he can’t quite recall, “No!” He opens his eyes.

Then shut them against the sun. And resumed his journey to the car.

Try as I like to find the way

I never can get back by day

Nor can remember plain and clear

The curious music that I hear.

“If Daddy is dead, it will be up to me to look after this family.”

It was dusk of the day after the shooting. Frances was in the clear thanks to the nurse who’d seen worse, but James was still missing. Mercedes was allowing the possibility of her father’s death to surface in her mind. She was sitting on the veranda, watching the street and peeling a pomegranate — an extravagant impulse, purchased from an old West Indian woman at the corner of Seventh Street.

“If Daddy is dead, I’ll have to start teaching. I’ll sell his tools.”

Mercedes was reassured by her logical train of thought, though a little startled by the caboose: “If Daddy is dead, we’ll be better off.”

She bit into the sweet wine cluster. “If he isn’t dead” — for Mercedes had to face this possibility too — “my job will simply be more demanding.”

By the time she discerned the outline of the Buick behind the headlights, Mercedes’ plans were firm enough to withstand the recognition. She observed the car creep along in second gear, genuflecting at every pot-hole in the street, and her first thought was “I’ll have to learn to drive.”

She folded her arms and watched as the car pulled into the driveway and jerked to a halt. As its lights died, she saw James’s head loll back and his mouth fall open. A moment later she heard him fumbling for many seconds with the door handle. It opened and he got out. In the falling dark, she saw him descend slowly to his knees. He walked like that up the stone path to the veranda.

The one thing Mercedes hadn’t counted on was that her father might return a penitent. Such a thing might interfere with her plans. She had no energy left to be the daughter of a good man. She had only energy enough to be the head of this family.

By the time he reached the steps and began to drag himself up them on all fours, she was near enough to hear the effort in his breath and realize that he was not penitential but merely sick. She had assumed he didn’t see her so she jolted in her skin when he spoke, “Hello my dear.”

He was by now in a heap against the front door. Her reflexive mortification was replaced by the cool sense that it was just as well to have everything in the open between them. Yes, I watched you fall and did not stir to help.

James raised his eyes and looked at her. His eyes had turned younger, bluer. Or maybe that was only an illusion created by his face having got older. Mercedes couldn’t see that yet, all she saw was that his eyes looked young and half his face was in shadow. It wasn’t until she saw him under electric light later that night that she realized it wasn’t a shadow at all, at least not in the usual sense.

She rose from her spare wooden chair and got her father into the dark house.

“Daddy!” Lily swung wildly down the stairs, barefoot in her nightgown, and wrapped herself around him, “Daddy, my daddy.”

Such a baby still — Mercedes tried to think it fondly.

James patted Lily’s head more awkwardly than usual.

“You hurt your hands,” Lily cried, holding them in hers and feeling: his left one curled defenceless with its serrated knuckles, his right one strong but scabbed over at the palm.

“I’ll make some tea,” said Mercedes, gaining an inch in height en route from the front hall to the kitchen stove, shivering slightly at the unaccustomed breeze passing through the new spaces in her spine.

James swayed a little with just Lily to hold him, it was time for him to fall again but she didn’t let him.