“Frances is sleeping, sit down.”
He’s fully awake now and has registered Mercedes’ unaccustomed tone. He looks at her, and sits back down slowly. “What did I do?”
“You tried to touch Lily.”
His hands fly up to keep his shattered face from spilling onto the carpet, a moan oozes out between his fingers. Mercedes feels a twinge of compunction, then thrusts the point of her lie under and up, “I had to drag you off her.”
He doubles over, caught in the ribs, his moan turns to a squeak. Mercedes gives quarter. “She didn’t wake up.”
His head starts shaking no behind his hands, he leaves the sofa without straightening up, to do so might be to lose his guts, and he staggers out of the room, out of the house like that. Mercedes hears the car engine start. If her father chooses to drive himself over a cliff, so be it. And if Mercedes burns an extra millennium in purgatory as a result, that’s simply the cost of doing business with God. The bottom line is that she has rescued Frances. Finally. Mercedes is neither a saint nor a sinner. She is somewhere in between. She is why purgatory was invented.
Over a late and unusually hearty breakfast, Frances reads about the accident in the Cape Breton Post. Jameel, well, that doesn’t much matter either way, her days as a booze queen being over, but Boutros — that is a relief. The way he looked at her. Not like the other fellas. Brooding, as if he wanted something she didn’t have for sale. What that could be, she could only imagine as rape.
“Are you sure you want more porridge, Frances?”
“Look Lily, that’s our cousin and our uncle by marriage.”
Lily refills Frances’s bowl and reads the headline, “‘Hero’s Death For Whitney Pier Man’”. The story reports that the brand-new 1932 8-cylinder Kissel swerved to avoid a carload of Congregation of Notre Dame nuns on their way back to Holy Angels from an evening spent at a massed choir practice.
“Mercedes was there!”
“So what, Lily?”
“Well she said Sister Saint Monica offered her a drive home but she said she wanted to walk, but if she’d taken the drive then the sisters wouldn’t have passed the car with our cousin and uncle in it and they wouldn’t’ve crashed.”
“Yeah Lily, and if a zillion invertebrates hadn’t died around here a trillion stupid years ago, we wouldn’t have a gravel driveway.”
Lily reads on. “It says the Mounties got to the car and knew someone else was driving because ‘Mr Jameel was lodged in the passenger side of the vehicle. Boutros Jameel was found on the rail tracks. After having crashed to avoid the nuns, he walked two miles towards New Waterford in the throes of death, presumably in order to fetch a doctor for his father.’”
Frances is thoroughly creeped. Imagine that enormous living dead man slouching towards New Waterford, set to heave himself on her with his dying breath. Just how hard it was for him to be killed is a measure of what she would have been in for if he had ever got his massive mitts on her.
The young Mountie guides his cruiser over a well-worn dirt track through the woods, following a crudely drawn map. Jameel was a half-decent businessman. He kept a strict account of all his transactions in a small leather-bound notebook that the Mountie found tucked in his breast pocket at the crash site. Jameel had been careful not to use any real names, however. His code name for James: The Enklese Bastard. The pencilled map leading to the distillery of The Enklese Bastard was an incautious but temporary measure — he drew it according to James’s instructions over the phone when Taylor quit.
X marks the spot, but when the young Mountie pulls up this morning expecting either to nab his man or to lie in wait, all that’s left of X is a charred patch of earth and some smoking planks. So much for corpus delicti. The Mountie turns round and heads back to Sydney. He doesn’t see the tan Buick sedan parked in a gully nearby.
“Is she going to holler rape?”
“No.”
The Cape Breton Post is on Teresa’s kitchen table. She and Adelaide have agreed that Ginger picked as good a time as any to quit Jameel’s. Hector is in his usual place, rocking. Teresa pours Adelaide more tea.
“What makes you so sure?” Teresa asks.
“‘Cause she got what she wanted, so she said.”
“What’s that?”
“A baby.”
Teresa is struck dizzy but doesn’t let on. She sits down carefully and commences to stir and stir her tea, asking, “Do you believe that?”
“If she timed it right, sure. You can tell if it takes, you know, I always could right from the first one.”
Adelaide feels bad suddenly because here she is talking to Teresa about how a woman knows when she’s pregnant, while Teresa herself is bound never to be so, though it’s what she wanted most.
Adelaide has always wondered how a head injury could injure a man’s sexual power. That steel bar never fell on Hector’s privates, his seed must be good as ever, and he’s not downright paralysed, just all over reduced. If it had been Adelaide, she’d have seen if he still worked, then she would have got a baby from him. Hector loves children. They could have managed. She and Ginger would’ve helped look after it. But Adelaide knows Teresa is different, altogether finer. She’s like royalty, the real kind, not snobbish, just innately fine. You can’t picture Teresa straddling a broken-down man for his seed. So if Hector still does work in that way, Adelaide’s certain Teresa hasn’t tested him out. Teresa’s in her forties. Soon she’ll be too old, if she isn’t already.
“Addy, what if it’s true?”
“Don’t worry, Trese, I’ve got something in mind.”
“Addy —”
“Trese, don’t ask, ’cause I’m not telling anyone beforehand, I don’t want anyone changing my mind this time or driving me all over hell’s half acre.” Adelaide gives Hector a pat on the head and goes home to get supper. “Thanks for the tea, girl.”
Teresa sees her to the door and returns to the kitchen, where Hector is staring up at the top cupboard with a worried look in his eye.
“Don’t worry, honey,” she tells Hector, “it’s still there.”
But she goes to the back room to fetch the stepladder, intending to take a look just to be sure. Teresa is not one to clamber on kitchen counters.
Adelaide has told no one of what she intends to do. She has forgiven Ginger. She has forgiven Teresa for taking her off the scent last night. But it has been demonstrated that, in this matter, she can trust only herself. She has planned it carefully and this time no one is going to stop her.
Just after supper, she gets on her bicycle with the long wicker baskets attached to the sides. When her business was thriving she could carry whole bolts of fabric in them. Today she carries something else in one of them. She rides the Shore Road to New Waterford. The beginnings of a beautiful sunset.
Adelaide could wait three months and find out if Frances really is pregnant before doing what she means to do. But what’s the point? If she’s not pregnant she’s likely to start harassing him again. Coming around. The most disturbing part of Leo’s disturbing story was that Frances knew Adelaide’s secret name for him. She’d practically have to have been in bed with them to know that. And a girl who would inflict an injury on herself, risk drowning to get what she wants — wouldn’t such a girl also use blackmail? Accuse Leo of rape if he doesn’t give her what she wants? Adelaide pumps the pedals harder, ignoring the blazing sky to her right and the sparkling water to her left.
Mercedes is walking home from her talk with the priest. He has agreed to inform the bishop. His Grace will then decide whether it is appropriate to interview Lily with regard to the growing list of remarkable events — without, of course, letting Lily know the reason for his inquiry. Mercedes lifts her face to the slanting sun. Everything has turned a ruddy gold, God’s blessing at its most gentle, “all’s right with the world.” The calamities of Frances have peaked just as Lily’s sanctity is at its most evident and Mercedes is grateful to find herself up to handling both. Tomorrow she will go to confession and obtain absolution for wronging her father.