“Are you all right, Frances, I didn’t mean to hurt you, honey, here.” He wants to tear off his jacket, shirt, wrap her up, but his clothes are soaking wet so he folds her in his arms instead.
“I’m sorry,” she cries, “I’m sorry,” and clings to him.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he pats her shoulder-blade.
After a moment her shivering subsides and she strokes the back of his neck, kisses his cheek, grazing his ear, “Thank you,” she rests her thigh between his legs and brushes his mouth accidentally with her lips, “sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
“Don’t leave me, please, I’m so frightened of the dark,” closer.
“I won’t leave you, but —” he’s embarrassed to find he’s hard, he didn’t know till now he wanted her, still doesn’t know, “excuse me,” and he moves to release her.
“That’s okay,” she whispers, kissing his mouth, moving next to him, “ohhh,” she says and her fingers sink into his shoulders. He pulls her a little closer without meaning to, she sighs again and reaches down, “that’s okay little Ginger Man,” her voice is so gentle, she undoes his pants and slides against him, “that’s okay …” and she says his secret name. He moans. Misery and desire, because with that she’s onto him and all around him and he can only move inside her.
Ginger’s private name must not be written down. It’s bad enough that Frances knows it.
When Mercedes’ hand uncovers Lily’s eyes, Lily sees her father lying bunched up at the foot of the stairs. The bayonet has landed a safe six steps above him. In retrospect, Mercedes calculates that he was highly unlikely to land anywhere near the blade, considering the position of his hand on the railing and its loose grip on the weapon at the time of the fall. Furthermore, he was sufficiently drunk to render the fall likely non-lethal. But Mercedes faces the fact that she merely pushed. And calculated later. She has not read Dr Freud. She takes no solace in the subconscious. She takes responsibility. She decides in that moment to stop her penance in the coal cellar. It appears to her suddenly as so much whining. Yes, she will confess this sin of pushing her father. But she knows now that no good act is ever unaccompanied by evil. That is what original sin has done to us. That is what makes us human. The necessity of sin itself is the cross we must bear.
God did not put me on this earth to stand by while my sister Frances is killed. Beaten is one thing. Wrongly touched is one thing. Stabbed with a bayonet is another. Push. Be strong enough to carry the burden of sin that goes with doing the right thing. There is only one saint in this family and I’m not it.
God has made Mercedes a judge. No one loves you for that. Not like a crippled child who’s prone to visions. Whom Mercedes prizes. Not like a fallen woman who makes people laugh. Whom Mercedes loves.
Mercedes is standing straight as steel, staring down at James. Brown-eyed people are popularly believed to be soft somewhere. And warm. Look again.
Lily walks carefully down the stairs in her bare feet, holding onto both railings. She bends over James. A line of spit runs from the corner of his mouth. She strokes his hair and gives him a kiss on the cheek. His eyelashes flutter. She looks up at Mercedes, and says, “He’s not dead.”
“Good. Now go to bed.”
Curled deep in the hope chest left open by James, Trixie hears Frances call her name and leaps out, padding down the stairs, across the hall and into the room Frances used to share with Lily. But Frances is not here. There’s just Lily kneeling at the window, her hands folded on the ledge, looking out. Trixie brushes the soles of Lily’s feet as Mercedes swishes past the bedroom door, the bayonet flashing in her hand. Up in the darkness of the attic, Mercedes dumps everything back into the hope chest as quickly as possible, pressing its lid down snug against air and moths.
Frances’s eyes burst open. She had a dream about Trixie just now. Frances was calling and calling her but Trixie was locked in a box and smothered. It was just a dream. Don’t move. Don’t wake this man who’s crushing me now.
Frances doesn’t want to have to stand up and lose any of his goodness down her legs. And she’ll have to stand up if he awakens because he’ll be clamouring to get out of here, wondering what in the name of God he’s done, and if he leaves she’ll have to go with him because she sure as shooting doesn’t intend to walk the five miles home. Not in what she hopes is her delicate condition. She’ll lie still for another couple of hours.
“Wiggle your toes.”
James groans and lolls his head. Mercedes pours more ice-water on his face and he uncrumples with a jerk.
“Good,” she says. She gets behind him, hooking her hands under his arms, and yanks him into a sitting position.
“Help me now,” she orders. He slumps onto his knees. She gets him standing, then hauls him like timber into the front room, where he collapses onto the couch and passes out again. She looks at him with her arms folded for a moment, then leaves and returns with a blanket. She tosses it over him.
Advancing steadily towards the front of her mind is the memory of what she and Frances can’t know together out loud. She has kept this memory on top of a pile of things at the back of her mind. Not buried. Right there where she can see it every time she passes the open door. But as long as she keeps it in the back room, she can believe that it belongs with the rest of the old junk. As long as she doesn’t talk about it, it can remain overlooked by amateurs and experts alike: the gilt frame covered with dust, the painting gummed over with neglect — who would guess what a piece of work lies dormant there.
But it has stirred. Torn itself from its frame, and now it’s coming closer and closer — stop. That’s far enough.
Mercedes takes the cap off the lemon oil and picks up her dust-rag. If she’s going to look at what just arrived behind her eyes, she has to have something to occupy her hands.
It was here in the living-room. The painting from the junk pile is called Daddy and Frances in the Rocking-Chair. But there never was a rocking-chair, in this room or any other. Just the pale green wingback. Mercedes’s white rag goes round and round, bringing up the mahogany sheen on the piano.
It was the night of Kathleen’s funeral. I got up because Frances was gone from our bed. You could see her imprint in the snow sheets and pillow. I looked out at the creek but she’s not there. Good. Maybe she’s gone downstairs for something to eat. She must be hungry by now, she hasn’t had anything but imaginary food for two days. I will go downstairs too, and make cinnamon toast. I pictured myself and Frances eating cinnamon toast and drinking cocoa at the kitchen table, but I didn’t put on my tartan housecoat or my slippers, which is how I know now I didn’t really believe in the cinnamon toast. Bad things happen when Frances gets out of bed. I’m not afraid of the dark. I had two long french braids. On my way down the stairs I heard a sound like a puppy. I walked down the stairs towards the light spilling through the front-room archway on the right. To the left is the dark kitchen and a smell like the inside of someone’s body. In the front room the reading lamp will be on, the yellow one with the pleated shade that stands over the wingback chair. I get to the archway. I was right, it is the reading lamp. Frances is there looking at me already. I wonder how long she’s been waiting for me. She had blonde ringlets then and no laugh lines. She’s sitting on Daddy’s lap, sideways, facing me. Rocking. He’s rocking her. But it’s not working, she’s wide awake. He doesn’t see me because he’s looking into her hair. His mouth is open a little, an upside-down new moon. He’s making the sound. The skin on his face looks pulled back by an undertow, his head is straining forward not to drown. His right hand hovers, barely touching the halo of yellow fuzz Frances gets from turning on her pillow, and his left hand is under and up her nightgown like a puppeteer’s. He says something I can’t hear, then breathes up hard through his nose, then “my little girl,” and the chewed-up word “beautiful,” then he shoves her down between his legs and pins one hand across her chest, the other one still operating underneath, they’re both facing in the same direction now but Frances turns her face to keep our eyes together. His head snaps back and he jams her up between his legs once, again, three times and a half, until he trembles at the ceiling. That’s when the fear goes out of him and he crumples around her and cries into her hair. Frances and I keep looking at each other until he falls asleep like that, then she crawls out from behind his arms and walks over to me. “It doesn’t hurt,” she says. Now I see a piece of him behind the narrow opening in his pants. I go get the crocheted comforter from the sofa and I put it over him without looking again, it’s rude to stare. Sizzling comes from the kitchen across the hall. I don’t like that smell of kidneys cooking. “Me neither,” says Frances. We go back upstairs to bed and I sing songs to her until I fall asleep. The next day, Frances sucked on dough and Mumma died in the kitchen.