The air splashes and spumes against it, threatening to drown it — them — for there are two but they have yet to be cut in half, they are still one creature, really, male and female segments joined at the belly by a common root system. It-they is a blood breather and could drown in this fatal spray of oxygen, will drown if they remain silent much longer, will become bright blue fishes in a moment. But the cords are cut, snip-snap, and tied just in time, and in an instant the shocking air is gulped and strafed into the lungs. They become babies just in time; slick, bloody, new, wailing, squinting, furious, two.
One of them, the male child, bleeds a little from a cut on his ankle. His feet were nestled next to his sister’s head when the scissors descended. He was all set to arrive head first like a good mammal. Technically, therefore, the female twin is responsible for the death of the mother, for it is she who was breech. But this was pure roulette. The pair had been revolving counter-clockwise in the chamber for weeks before their birth was triggered.
Kathleen is an abandoned mine. A bootleg mine, plundered, flooded; a ruined and dangerous shaft, stripped of fuel, of coal, of fossil ferns and sea anemones and bones, of creatures half plant, half animal, and any chance that any of it might end up a diamond.
James has supposedly seen worse. He was in the war after all. Now he finally sees something from which he will not recover. Beyond shell-shock. Beyond No Man’s Land.
In a cavern in a canyon,
excavating for a mine,
dwelt a miner, forty-niner,
and his daughter Clementine.
Light she was and like a fairy,
and her shoes were number nine,
herring boxes without topses,
shoes they were for Clementine.
Oh m’darlin, oh m’darlin, oh m’darlin Clementine;
you are lost and gone forever,
dreadful sorry, Clementine.
Here’s what Kathleen saw just before the moment of respite. Between agony and release, she saw — framed by the door which is thumping like a heart attack — Pete. With his head off Hello little girl. This time he’s not behind her in the mirror. He is out in the open. It’s safe for him now. And after all, he just wants to get a look at her, just one good look Hello there. His no face tucked beneath his arm Hello.
And when he has looked his fill, he politely nods his stump of neck and leaves. She whimpers briefly. There is the blissful release from pain. Nothing has ever been better than this moment. It is enough. And then all we can do is see her through her mother’s eyes, because her own are extinguished.
Materia’s dilemma was this: Do I let the mother live by removing the infants limb by limb, finally crushing the heads to allow for complete expulsion from the mother’s body? It is hard to imagine a worse sin for a Catholic. The sin resides not in the gory details of the operation, because the details of doing the right thing are equally gory. The sin resides in preferring the life of the mother to those of the children. For this you are eternally damned. Materia does the right thing by allowing the mother to die and the children to live.
So why does Materia die a few days later of a guilty conscience? Because she did the right thing for the wrong reason. For a reason which was itself a mortal sin. For two days she wrestles with her conscience. But God is everywhere. It takes Materia forty-eight hours to face that what she did, although correct in the eyes of the Church, was murder in His all-seeing eyes: the real reason I let my daughter die is because I knew she was better off that way. I didn’t know her well, but I knew she didn’t want to live any more. She preferred to die and I allowed her to do so.
Looked at from this angle, Materia has not saved two babies, she has mercy-killed one young woman, and therein lies the mortal sin. For Materia cannot swear that, had her daughter been clamouring for life, she might not have used the scissors to dismember the infants rather than open the sky for them. In her heart of hearts she suspects this might have been so. And in this suspicion Materia discovers the chill comfort that, in the end, she managed to love her daughter after all.
God sees an opening and rushes in. He makes himself comfortable in the back of Materia’s mind for a couple of days, during which time she cleans obsessively.
On the third day she cleans the oven, first turning on the gas to soften up the grit inside, it’ll only take a moment. She is so tired. She hasn’t slept in three nights, not so much as a tiny zizz, and she has never worked harder. She kneels in front of the oven, peering in, waiting for the gas to do its work, her arms folded on the rack. It’ll only take a moment — she rests her head upon her arms. She is so tired. She will start scrubbing in just a moment, just one more moment….
For the umpteenth time that week James has to improvise a criminal mind, for he doesn’t naturally have one. He turns off the gas, hauls his late wife upstairs and onto their bed, scrunches her rosary into her hands, then calls the doctor and the priest. This allows Materia to be buried next to Kathleen in the churchyard instead of in an unsanctified field somewhere — in the type of place where soldiers and suicides and unbaptized babies sit out eternity, some unholy No Man’s Land.
The Mass Card
May Jesus have mercy on the Soul of
Mrs James (Materia) Piper (née Mahmoud)
Died June 23, 1919
Age 33
“We have loved her in life. Let us not abandon her, until we have conducted her by our prayers into the house of the Lord.” ST. AMBROSE
Solace Art. Co. - 202 E. 44th St. N.Y.
Frances is going on six now. She has a number of questions regarding the mass card, but this is clearly not the time or place to raise them. Mercedes kneels next to her, crying and crying into her little white gloves, her hanky already drenched. Daddy’s face is frozen. If the wind changes it will stay that way for ever. Mrs Luvovitz, in a pew across the aisle, is crying behind her black veil. This is the first time Mrs Luvovitz has ever been inside a church. Mrs MacIsaac is there too, with dusty grapes on her hat. Frances decides the wind must have changed for her long ago. Filling in for Materia at the organ is Sister Saint Cecilia. Or at least it must be she within the flowing black robe beneath the Gothic skyline of starched white wimple. Frances thinks it logical that nuns wear cathedrals on their heads.
At the back of the church there is a phalanx of strangers. People with black curly hair, full features and smooth olive faces. These are some of Frances’s unknown relatives. Frances’s unknown Grandfather Mahmoud is not present. For him this funeral is redundant. Right now he’s locked in the back of his store, hunched on a plain wooden chair, apparently poring over a ledger.