Mercedes’ patience for this task is unlimited. She plans to surprise Daddy with it. He never talks about his own family except to say they all died. Perhaps she can restore to Daddy a fragment of what he has lost.
After supper on this evening, Lily comes up to find Mercedes going over all the pencil lines in careful ink.
“Thank you for supper, Mercedes.”
Mercedes looks up sharply to see if Lily is being mean. But Lily is never intentionally cruel; Mercedes knows that and repents of her suspicion. She returns to her work and says merely, “Hmm.”
Lily approaches and looks over Mercedes’ shoulder, fascinated.
“How come it doesn’t look like a tree?”
“‘Tree’ is only an expression, Lily. If it looked like a tree then it would be art. This is a chart.”
“Like a map?”
“Kind of.”
“Is there treasure?”
“Each name is a treasure.”
“Where does it lead to?”
“‘Map’ is just an expression too. It doesn’t lead anywhere.” Mercedes relaxes back in her chair. “Well, maybe in a way it does. It leads into the past. It tells us where we came from. But it doesn’t tell us where we’re going. Only God knows that.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re right here on the same line with me and Frances and Kathleen, God rest her soul.”
“Where’s Other Lily?”
“She doesn’t appear here, dear.”
“How come?”
“She was never baptized.”
“But she was our sister.”
“Yes, and we love her and pray for her, but that’s not how it works on a family tree.”
“Where’s Ambrose?”
Mercedes looks at Lily. “Who’s Ambrose?”
Lily looks back at Mercedes. “Will you read me a story?”
“Of course I will, dear, you go climb into your nightgown and pick one out, I’ll be right there.”
At three that morning, Mercedes slumbers beneath a finger of moonlight. As usual, her door is an inch or so ajar — she has nothing to hide and plenty to listen for. The door begins to open silently. Mercedes’ eyes open. In time to see it swing to rest wide enough to admit a draft. Or a very small child.
“Who’s there?”
No answer. The soft, barely discernible pad-padding of tiny feet. Approaching the bed.
“Trixie?”
Silence. Trixie never visits her room.
“Go ’way, Trixie.”
At the corner of Mercedes’ eye, a whitish glimmer. Her blood cools. Not Trixie. Mercedes raises her head. The thing moves into the slant of moonlight. And there — oh Mother of God — an unholy infant. Swathed in a mockery of the first holy sacrament. Mercedes tries but fails to say, “Out.”
Dressed in the baptismal gown, stained with the Devil’s swart embrace.
“Out” — a cracked whisper.
Two yellow eyes.
“Out out out out, ou-ou-t!” straight from her bowels.
James bolts through the door, flails, finds and yanks the electric light chain to see Mercedes shuddering, staring, teeth bared, rosary at her chest.
“What’s happened?”
Mercedes speaks but her sobs snatch and tear the words; he grips her shoulders. “Look at me.” He shakes her. “Look at me.” She does. She pulls herself up and away from the void, then says, “I thought I saw something.”
He nods and sits down on the edge of her bed. There is, and is not, any such thing as a ghost. This house, for example: James, honest with himself, admits that there are places and times which he avoids in his own home. Not out of belief — out of that spot on the back of his neck that stirs now and then for no reason. That’s when he wishes he had the right to pray. Because that’s what the unquiet need. “Pray for us” is what they’re saying with their moans and midnight walks.
James runs his tongue over the dry bluish sheen of his lower lip and Mercedes notices how long his lashes are. He speaks to her — to her alone — oh it seems for the first time since she was a very little girl.
“Your grandmother. My mother. Saw something once. Or no. Heard.”
Mercedes waits. Daddy has never mentioned his mother to anyone but me, now, at this moment … and perhaps once long ago to Kathleen. Mercedes holds her breath, not to startle the moment. So fragile. All the fine things, anything not smudged, all things that can never wither but break so easily, that’s what he is.
“Music,” he says. “It was a sunny day. She couldn’t tell you what instrument or what tune, or even which way it came — whether in through the window, or right beside her. Just that she thought, ‘That must be what heaven’s like.’ It was that beautiful. So she knelt down where she was in the kitchen and said a prayer of thanks because she’d had that little taste, see? And after that she was never afraid of anything.”
Mercedes forms her small smile. She holds her tears in a reservoir. Tears could only dampen a moment such as this and set it to mildew, guaranteeing its decay.
A voice from the door. “What’s the matter?”
“Hey, little buddy.” James goes to Lily and scoops her up, Lily fastens her legs around his waist. She’s too big to be picked up, thinks Mercedes, answering, “I thought I —” but she catches Daddy’s warning look and revises her story; “Nothing, Lily, I rode the nightmare is all.”
“Did you see the bodechean?”
James laughs at the old Gaelic expression. “There’s no such thing, who told you about the bodechean?”
“Frances.”
Shut up, Lily, for once can’t you just shut up, but Mercedes says, “Frances was just teasing, there’s no such thing.”
“Mercedes, want to sleep with me and Frances?”
“No. Thank you, Lily.”
“Give your sister a kiss goodnight, Lily.”
They leave and Mercedes, thoroughly back to herself, rises and crosses to the centre of the room, douses the light and returns to bed in the dark, scornfully recalling the days when she believed that long-necked creatures resided beneath her bed waiting to bite her ankles.
She kneels at the side of her bed and starts the rosary. Just in time, because she felt the first inkling of the long-necked things just now, when her mind’s disdain wore off. Bedside kneeling in the dark is always the hardest, for imagine the things wrapping themselves around your upper legs. Pulling you under. Don’t imagine anything past that, nothing like that is going to happen as long as you say your rosary. With a pure heart. Mercedes despises herself for these childish superstitions, knows them to be groundless, but can’t stop the retractions in her thigh muscles all the same. These small flexings often lead to a dread feeling farther up that craves undoing, and it’s this feeling more than all the others that serves to remind one that — while there are no long-necked creatures under the bed, and the bodechean is merely a pagan notion — there is certainly a Devil. Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen.
Mercedes imagines her unknown grandmother bathed in sunlight, kneeling in thanks for the foretaste of heaven. Then she considers the visitation which she herself has just been vouchsafed. God gives us each something different.
Frances is in the cellar, holding a coal-oil lamp to the gap between the furnace and the blackened wall, where Trixie is wedged as far back as possible. Trixie’s lace bonnet is askew, her white satin gown a sooty mess. Earlier this evening, just before supper, she scrowled out of Frances’s hold in the attic and streaked down to the cellar for refuge. Cats don’t enjoy dress-ups. She stayed behind the furnace until the house fell silent. Then she crept out and up the stairs. To Mercedes’ room.