Finally the house is quiet. Where’s Frances? Mercedes creeps softly into the hallway. She looks up the attic stairs. There’s a little light up there, but silence. Mercedes has no desire to go up there. Perhaps the thing in the back of her mind takes better care of her than the thing in the back of Frances’s mind. Perhaps. Mercedes turns away from the attic door and walks towards her parents’ bedroom. On her way she steps in something sticky. She gives herself a gentle reprimand for not putting her slippers on, and in fact gropes her way back to her room, finds her slippers and her green tartan housecoat and puts them on, tying the flannel belt snugly around her waist and smoothing down her hair before venturing back out into the hallway. She reaches the door of her parents’ room. It’s half open. She stands very still and listens. Nothing. No breathing. Her heart leaps for a moment, no breathing! She is young enough to fear that both her parents may simply have died in their sleep. She moves softly towards their bed and reaches out her hands like a sleepwalker, still listening. Will they be there? Will it be their bodies? Will they wake up and be annoyed with her? It’s a sin to doubt so much. If you really have faith in God you won’t go around expecting to find your parents dead in their bed for no reason. Say a little prayer. “I’m sorry, dear God.” Now let your hands descend gently towards the bed and — nothing — empty sheets. What a relief, they’re not lying there dead, they’re just not there at all. Oh no! Where are they? It’s the middle of the night, where are my parents? Where is Mumma, where is Daddy? Stop it, you’re going to make God angry, you deserve to find them dead downstairs, murdered by a tramp.
Mercedes’ almost-seven-year-old nerves are still tender but tonight begins a process that will eventually turn them into steel. Her little nerve fibres are being heated up. Tonight is the smelter. When her nerves have been heated up enough, when they are white-hot, they’ll be plunged into cold water, tempered and strong for ever. Strong enough to support a building or a family, strong enough to prevent the house at 191 Water Street from caving in on itself in the years to come. It will stand. It will stand. But for now: go downstairs….
Mercedes’ search carries on in this way. Listening, listening. Looking, looking. She finds no one downstairs. Apparently she is all alone in the house. Oh, except for Kathleen. Or maybe Kathleen is gone too. Maybe they’ve all gone and left her. You could go check, Mercedes. Check in the attic. No. “And besides,” Mercedes answers, “Kathleen doesn’t speak any more, she couldn’t tell me where they’ve gone.” You haven’t checked the cellar. “There’s nothing in the cellar but coal and the furnace.”
It would take a less rational sort of person to conduct the type of search that would result in real information — the type of search that turns up the reading glasses in the ice-box and the car keys in the medicine cabinet. But then, it takes a less rational sort of person to misplace things so spectacularly. Or to speculate, “Hmmm, perhaps my mother is locked in the coal cellar, I’ll just have a little look-see.” And it would take the sort of person who can’t resist trouble to actually climb those attic steps after the wailing and rampaging that have issued from that direction. Mercedes can resist. She can hold out against trouble, against curiosity, someone has to.
She returns to her bedroom. She makes the blankets into a cloak around her and sits on her knees on her bed, staring out the window at the moon over the back yard. Our Lady is in the moon. The cool white light is her love. Everything’s going to be all right. And finally Mercedes sees something which is not an absence. It’s Frances, down there in the creek. She’s holding something, cradling it — a bundle. And on the embankment there’s something moving. A small animal. A kitten. That must also be a kitten she’s holding. Frances dunks the bundle, then dives after it. What’s she doing? No! No, Frances loves kittens, she wouldn’t be drowning them. She’s giving them a bath. That’s what she’s doing. She puts the one kitten down and picks up the other one, but Mercedes doesn’t see what happens next because Daddy comes into the yard and up to the creek, blocking her view. Uh oh, Frances is really going to get it now. Well, she shouldn’t be up playing in the creek at this hour anyhow. In fact, no one’s allowed playing in the creek ever. It’s not a beach. Mercedes sees the struggle, the extent of Frances’s disobedience in running back to the creek, leaping in. Why is she so bad? Some people are just made that way.
When Frances comes to bed she is ice-cold. Mercedes pretends to be fast asleep, and in her pretend sleep she snuggles over to Frances and folds her into her tartan housecoat. Frances is bare naked. This too is unusual. But no matter how Mercedes snuggles Frances, Frances goes on shivering.
Mercedes will never again sleep through a night. From now on she will be listening even in her sleep. Someone has to.
In the morning, Mercedes notices the blood in her slipper. She washes it out. The only other thing different about this morning is that, if you look out at the garden, you’ll notice that the scarecrow is gone and in its place there’s a big rock.
The Adoration of The Body
James, knee-deep in water, reached up and placed the dead infant on the ground on the far side of the creek, then climbed out after it. Frances was holding the girl baby close against her stained and soaking nightgown and she made a move to head back to the house.
“Stay right where you are!”
Frances watches as Daddy squishes in his wet shoes over to the scarecrow. He takes hold of its legs and yanks at it as if he were uprooting a small tree. Its head wobbles and falls off and rolls down the slope into the creek with a splash. The creek begins to carry it away. Frances watches the head bobbing along on the water and thinks, “He’s going to find my black and white candy, he’s going to eat it, he’s going to tell someone in a far-off land what I did.” The head is carried off and out of sight towards the sea. But the hat remains. The crunched fedora.
James tears the scarecrow free of the earth. Its body was impaled on a stake and that stake must have been green wood, because now that Daddy has yanked the pointed end from the ground you can see it is alive with pale sprouting roots. Eventually a tree would have grown right up through the scarecrow. Maybe with fruit too. A branch would have grown straight out through his mouth, and on the end of the branch a big red apple. “Imagine,” thinks Frances. “Imagine if you had a tree growing inside you.” Imagine seeing the green leaves everywhere, trapped just under your skin and growing, imagine seeing the thin roots swirling under the surface of the soles of your feet, their white ends looking for a place to poke through. The earth is a magnet for roots.
James tosses the scarecrow across the creek. It lands with a thud next to Frances, its neck bleeding straw, its legs splayed crazy on either side of the teeming wooden stake. Frances can feel the scarecrow looking up at her. It has no head but she can see its expression anyway, pathetic and sad: “Why did you do this to me?” Lying there like a dying soldier wanting to give her a message from his dying throat: the location of the enemy, a message for a loved one back home, a piece of a joke, a piece of a poem, the address of his childhood home crystal-clear, the memory of a boy drinking from a summer stream in a painting or did that really happen, was that me? Frances doesn’t answer. She looks away from the scarecrow even though she knows it may move if she doesn’t keep an eye on it. Her arms have congealed around the clammy little baby. She fastens her eyes on the scarecrow’s hat. The hat is lying next to Daddy. And Daddy is digging in the garden. With his bare hands.