Robert McGill - Once We Had a Country

“For my grandmother,” she says.

He doesn’t take the letter from her. Instead, he gains a frustrated, almost disappointed look. “Three times this year they break into collection box,” he mutters. “You must understand.” Turning away, he walks down the aisle, glowers at the woman with the beehive as he passes her, and disappears into the other room.

The woman approaches Maggie with halting steps. “I apologize for my brother,” she says in the same accent as the priest’s. She has a slender white neck and pale lips almost indistinguishable from her skin. “You startle him. This parish is very little, yes? Friday mornings nobody comes; church for him is like part of rectory.” She turns her palms outward to indicate that this is unfortunate but not to be helped. “You are from U.S.A.?” Maggie nods. “My brother and I, we are from Czechoslovakia. You are Catholic? You will come to Mass? Oh, but look!” All at once she seems to have noticed that Maggie’s hand is holding the strap of her top. “From him? Is terrible, he will apologize. Stay here, I get pin for you.”

Without awaiting a response, she goes down the aisle and vanishes through the door. From the other room comes the noise of her and the priest arguing. Maggie listens awhile, then hastens away. Across the church’s front lawn she goes, splashing through the soaked grass like a child let out from school. The rain has stopped and the road glistens. She runs along it in the direction of the farmhouse, dogged by the wet slap of her sandals, one hand holding her top’s broken strap while the other is clenched around the waterlogged letter to her grandmother. After a time she realizes there’s no point carrying the thing, it’s ruined, she’ll have to rewrite it, so she squeezes the envelope into a ball and throws it into the ditch. It floats away on the runoff and seconds later disappears into a culvert.

The first confession she ever made was to murdering her mother by being born. For some reason Maggie’s father blamed himself for the death, but Maggie was the one who’d gotten stuck coming out. At nine years old she admitted this before the priest in Syracuse, stunning him into silence, and later that afternoon she told Gran too. Then Gran smacked her across the ear.

“It was your mother’s doing, no one else’s,” Gran declared.

Maggie was tempted to argue, but she had to be careful. Gran owned the house in which Maggie and her father lived and, although no one ever said as much, Maggie felt certain that if she were to fall from Gran’s good graces, Gran wouldn’t hesitate to throw them out. The house was right beside Gran’s, built for Maggie’s father when he gained a wife, and a pregnant one at that, a girl who refused to live with Gran and insisted she have a home to herself. Gran said the girl had showed some nerve, three months out of high school, expecting to be given the Taj Mahal. Even when Maggie was young, she suspected there was another side to the story, but Gran’s was the only one she heard. Her father never talked about it.

Gran didn’t speak about Maggie’s mother so disparagingly when Gordon was around. In his presence she didn’t speak of her at all. There was a rule against it, unspoken but as fixed as the other rules in Maggie’s life: that she must attend Mass with Gran; that Maggie’s father would never come with them; that Maggie was to pray each night for the conversion of Russia and never to read at the table. Gran said only Protestants did that. Maggie wasn’t to enter her father’s bedroom, either, although this was a rule she’d created for herself. She had made it after Gran told her that he had always wanted a lock for his bedroom when he was a boy, and Gran had refused to humour him, so when finally he’d gotten a house of his own, the first thing he’d done was to install a bolt on the bedroom door. As far as Maggie knew, he never actually used it, but she decided to honour the principle behind the thing.

Another rule was that on Friday nights and no others, Maggie and her father ate dinner at Gran’s. Those evenings Gordon never spoke unless his mother addressed him first, and then he responded with the fewest possible words. The rest of the week he didn’t set foot in his mother’s house and Gran didn’t enter theirs, though the homes were separated by not even a fence, only a shallow, grassy depression that lay dry most of the year. If Gran needed to talk with him, she telephoned. This she did at least once a day, and although she was the only person who ever called, Maggie’s father always said hello as if he didn’t have the foggiest notion who it could be. It seemed the case that as long as his mother was out of sight, he forgot she was a few yards away. He forgot that she owned his house, that she had gotten him his job. He seemed truly to believe there was just him and Maggie in the world, along with the ghost of his dead wife knocking about in the unlit rooms.

Sometimes Maggie liked to think her mother had merely run away, and that one day on a long car trip across America, Maggie would come upon her singing in a lounge or serving hamburgers at a diner. The problem with this fantasy was that Maggie could remember the first day of her life. She remembered lying with her mother at the hospital, the bright lights above them and the antiseptic reek from the floors, the apple-cheeked nurse hovering in her bleached uniform. Maggie remembered the soft scratch of the blanket around her and the warmth of her mother’s hands. She even remembered the exact moment when life passed from the fingers and a cold stiffness settled in. Gran told her this was nonsense and foolishness; no one could remember that far back.

“Your mother was a selfish, stuck-up girl,” said Gran. “And the mouth on her! Never when Gordon was around, mind you. In his eyes she could do no wrong. She had him right beneath her sticky little thumb.”

Her father thought otherwise. He said her mother was a cherub and an angel. But he and Gran didn’t have this argument in person, only through Maggie and the opinions she reported to each of them in turn, passing from house to house with her cargo of second-hand speech. She ran between her father and Gran like an electrical cord, crackling and throwing sparks, thrilling at how the things she said could make the two of them come alive.

“My mother wasn’t selfish,” Maggie told Gran one afternoon. “She was an angel and a cherub!” It was so easy and pleasurable to be contrary when Maggie was articulating someone else’s thoughts. If they were her own, she’d never speak with such recklessness or conviction.

Her father had stopped going to Mass after her mother died. Gran disapproved of this decision, if that’s what it was, but Maggie accepted its wisdom. For her quiet, introverted father to stay away from that place, with all its words and people, seemed natural, even necessary. She was sure that if he was ever forced to go, some disaster would strike from which he’d never recover.

Maggie told her father only once about remembering her birth. As she spoke, his expression grew glazed and terrified. For this man whom she loved more than anything, the loss of his wife was still a scabless wound. Seeing it plainly on his face, Maggie slaughtered her mother once more, this time in her mind, and silently vowed never to mention her again.

When she arrives back at the farmhouse, she’s still trying to decide what to tell Fletcher and Brid. If she reports her encounter with the two girls, Brid will probably say she’s a prude and needs to loosen up. She doesn’t want to tell Brid and Fletcher about the priest and his sister either. They’ll want to know why Maggie entered the church in the first place, and they won’t believe it was only because of the rain.

She’s halfway up the drive before she notices the mud-spattered truck parked by the house. It bears the logo of a gas company, and for a moment she feels a sense of relief, until she spots Fletcher on the porch, shirtless, arguing with a bald man in a blue uniform. As she draws nearer, she makes out a crest on the outfit that says his name is Frank. He has a slumped, wizened face with bloodhound eyes, and he keeps his forehead lowered in Fletcher’s direction like a bull preparing to charge.