“Look at me.” Frances stands naked, serene on the bathroom tiles.
Mercedes looks. And blushes with a prickly flush. No good pretending she has been looking after a child. She has been washing, stroking, feeding, drying a woman who is blooming like a hothouse rose. The nipples look ready to burst and scatter seed, the russet pubic hair hangs proud like a bunch of grapes. A fig leaf would not do in this case — ripe and uncooked, pink and grainy as that fruit, Frances’s whole boatful of genital cargo, from lip-wrapping-lips to clitoris in the prow, is in constant rockabye motion in response to the new deeper tides of her body. She is almost always somewhat aroused, can feel her soft-sided barque opening, closing, taking on water from within. Her body is making love to itself. Until now, Frances had no idea what all the fuss was about.
For once, Frances is stripped of irony. She is in the presence of something bigger — namely Herself. Or at least the self implied by her new body. This is how the Blessed Virgin visits us. She inhabits our own flesh and makes love out of it. Nothing is ironic in the moment of first love. And Frances is in love. With her body, and what it is bringing forth.
“Frances. You couldn’t still be pregnant. Not after what happened.”
Frances replies, “Especially after what happened.” She takes her white nightgown from the radiator and slips it on over her head, saying, “Thank you, Mercedes.”
Mercedes aches after Frances leaves the bathroom. Suddenly bereft, she sinks to the floor and leans her cheek against the enamel tub. The last of the water sucks down the drain and, before she knows why, her tears are flowing. It’s the same grief that’s been waiting, bottled, against the day of Frances’s death. Why has it been uncorked and sampled now? “Frances … my little Frances.” Mercedes manages to get the bottle stoppered, hurriedly fumbling as though unaware that it is a magic bottle, capable of refilling itself eternally.
She splashes cold water on her face and realizes she cried because Frances really has gone away — her Frances, that is. This new Frances says thank you; is careful of her health, looks forward to being a mother. My Frances is not a mother. My Frances is a child. Naughty but so dear. My child.
James has had his first stroke. But no one knows it, not even James. He just looks, and feels, older. One side of his face has slid a bit on its foundations. His left eye now always slightly sleepy, the left side of his mouth permanently triste. And he can’t make a good fist with his left hand. A state of “just woke up” along that whole side of him.
The stroke itself was actually a pleasant, if strange, experience. It happened after he torched the still in the woods that day of the disasters four months ago.
James soaked the still in gasoline, lit it and ran. The thing blew sky-high, which is why the young Mountie found little more than smouldering earth. Perhaps it was the boom that triggered James’s stroke — set a delicate patch of artery wall to trembling till it caved in and flooded a small surrounding area of his brain. Neurons drowned.
When he awoke, he was disoriented as to time. He noted the sun was in the same place as it had been when he ran and dove from the explosion. He got up and walked a few steps before the new imbalance of his body caught up with him and he fell to the left.
James had plenty of reasons to feel dizzy at that particular moment, considering all he’d recently been through. The idea that he might have had a small stroke would have seemed absurd to him. Overkill. He picked himself up and walked carefully from tree to tree until he reached the exploded fringe of the clearing, then he got down and crawled to the blackened spot on the ground where his industry had been. It was cold. That was how he knew at least twenty-four hours had passed.
He fell asleep. Or passed out. He opened his eyes next on a sky full of stars and a high new moon. For a moment he had no past. He was no one, no man. He was the clear night air. The next instant, however, he was a pit full of memory. Corroded shapes of used-to-be things, now twisted beyond recognition. He got onto his hands and knees, his head a wrecking ball, blind with pain. Molten glue sludging through the veins of his left side where his blood should flow. The right side of him had its first taste of dragging the left side like a wounded comrade as he struggled to his feet and, with his right hand, gripped a tattered sapling for support. He stayed there long enough for the sap to fuse his hand to the slender trunk and he left a layer of skin behind when he freed himself and staggered on.
He dropped carefully to his knees every so often when gravity got the better of his new inner-ear alignment. He’d hang his head to let a fresh wave of blood assault his brain. It hurt like hell but it was the only way to avoid fainting. Sometimes he’d fall farther with the weight of his head, from his knees onto his hands, his left hand failing to open on impact, taking the stony earth on bare knuckles. After this moment’s rest, the healthy soldier would lift the wounded one back up and continue the next few yards, the right palm seeping blood, the left hand torn at the knuckles.
His car was a hundred yards from the site of the still. He had covered twenty-five when dawn broke. Then he slept. Or passed out.
But the stroke itself was blissful. He had a dream, only more so. He saw his mother. He was a grown man just as he is now:
As in other dreams of her, she is accompanied by distant but everywhere music. An old-fashioned tune on the piano, ineffably sweet and full of meaning, unnameable and yet as familiar as the beating of his own heart. He knows his mother is in the music. His tears well up and fall, refreshing him. He is in a clearing of bright green woods. Not pine, not dark like around here, but old deciduous growth, tall and embracing. There is a birch tree among the oaks and elms. He knows this is his mother. He looks at the white bark of the tree and recognizes her dress.
He lies down, curled beneath the birch, and he hears her voice, Hello. He knows that if he turns to look into her face she will go away, so he concentrates on a blade of grass before his eyes, and she speaks to him, calling him by his Gaelic name, Hello, Seamus. Mo ghraidh. M’eudail. His tears soothe his face, parched to kindling.
He speaks to her. He tells her he is sorry. He feels her hand, cool on the side of his face. He knows she is healing him, but he also realizes that with this she is preparing to send him away from her, “No!” He feels she is condemning him back to a hell he can’t quite recall, “No!” He opens his eyes.
Then shut them against the sun. And resumed his journey to the car.
Try as I like to find the way
I never can get back by day
Nor can remember plain and clear
The curious music that I hear.
“If Daddy is dead, it will be up to me to look after this family.”
It was dusk of the day after the shooting. Frances was in the clear thanks to the nurse who’d seen worse, but James was still missing. Mercedes was allowing the possibility of her father’s death to surface in her mind. She was sitting on the veranda, watching the street and peeling a pomegranate — an extravagant impulse, purchased from an old West Indian woman at the corner of Seventh Street.
“If Daddy is dead, I’ll have to start teaching. I’ll sell his tools.”
Mercedes was reassured by her logical train of thought, though a little startled by the caboose: “If Daddy is dead, we’ll be better off.”
She bit into the sweet wine cluster. “If he isn’t dead” — for Mercedes had to face this possibility too — “my job will simply be more demanding.”