“HOW MANY TIMES MUST THIS be hashed over?” Mack said. “I’ve already told you everything I know.”
“I know, and we’re sorry.” Jeff held up his hands.
He really was a large man, Mack thought, and he felt dwarfed standing beside him.
“Dad, Jeff has a new theory. We want to run it by you.”
Sharon was leaning against a kitchen counter in a yellow rain slicker that looked oddly familiar, although he couldn’t place it.
Jeff walked back and forth in Mack’s kitchen, his trench coat billowing out behind him as he talked. George Peter Koch had left a note taped to the old death certificate. He had found Little Mary’s grave on a small island off the northern part of the state. Lambs Island was its name. Was that name familiar? Had he ever come across that name before?
No, that name was not familiar to Mack. He shook his head and said nothing.
Jeff showed him a copy of the note. “I thought maybe she had been committed. That was my theory at first, but here’s what I think now: I think that Mary was pregnant and died giving birth, and the baby she gave birth to was Doreen.”
Mack sat down heavily on a kitchen chair. Pregnant? Little Mary?
Jeff paced and pointed with his fingers as he talked. “I went to that island I talked about. I spoke with a woman there who was just a girl at the time. She said four people arrived on the island with a coffin and one of them, a woman—I’m thinking this was your sister Hilda—she was carrying a newborn baby and, get this, she was trying her darnedest to give it away.” Jeff stopped his walking and looked at him. “Was she pregnant, Mack? Do you remember? Was Little Mary pregnant? What happened on the day she died?”
Mack ran a damp hand over his face. “I don’t know,” he kept saying. “I don’t remember. Believe me.”
From the living room, the weather channel was predicting yet more rain. The day Little Mary had died was a day much like this one, misty and gray. And wasn’t it just about this time of year, too? Mack placed his hands on the table and looked down at them.
“She was crying,” Mack said to them. “I remember her screams that day. They frightened me. I left and went to the uncles’. Hilda arranged it.”
Jeff and Sharon sat down across from him at the kitchen table.
If he shut his eyes, he could still remember those screams, her wails. His grim-faced father had taken him quickly to the uncles’, not even stopping to let him bring his jacket.
“What’s the matter with Little Mary?” Mack had asked his father. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong!”
His father said nothing.
At the uncles’ Mackie went up the stairs and looked out the bedroom window and prayed for his sister. A few hours later, Hilda dropped off a bag with some of his clothes. “He’ll need to stay for a few days.”
Mack had watched from the top of the stairs. “What if I say we can’t keep him?” Uncle Ambrose had said. “What if I say take care of your own little brother. This is about Mary,
right?”
“We just need for him to stay here.”
Uncle Ambrose took the pipe he kept in his top pocket and began examining it. “And tell me,” he said in a loud voice. “What are you going to do with the baby? Going to pretend it doesn’t exist? Little hard to hide something like that, wouldn’t you say?”
Hilda turned. Her shoes clicked on the wooden porch when she walked.
“I knew it,” said Jeff, pounding the table with his fist, startling Mack. “I knew it. I say we go to Doreen. See what she knows.”
“I’d go careful with Doreen,” Mack said. “I’d go careful. She’s not quite right anymore. Mind’s failing a bit. You know that.”
Jeff smiled. Jeff always smiled. “We’ll be careful and kind.”
After they left, Mack put on his tweed cap and rain coat and grabbed his umbrella. He was intending to stop in at Mona’s for lunch, but ended up walking right past when he glanced in and saw a young couple, people he didn’t even know, sitting at his regular booth. He felt a drop on his hand and looked up. More rain. Not a breeze ruffled the still air. No, it wouldn’t clear for some time now. Not for some time. He continued walking, thinking about Little Mary and about Dean. Both cancers.
“It was Hilda.” He said it out loud as he walked the slick pavement, his shoes squawking with the wet. “Hilda,” he said again. “All Hilda.” The name felt like poison on his tongue. Hilda had arranged Little Mary’s confinement. Hilda had arranged for him to stay at the uncles’. Hilda had arranged for Little Mary to be buried on some obscure island.
Hilda had even arranged Dean’s leaving.
The blowout between Mack and his son had begun a full week before Dean walked out the door. Mack had wanted Dean to get some help, to pray more, to beseech God to change the situation. Didn’t his father realize, Dean had argued, that he had already tried all of those things? Didn’t he know? Couldn’t he at least try to understand? Just for once? To come down from that high horse?
“It was your mother’s death,” Mack said. “It affected us all.”
Hilda had shown up in the midst of this. She was happening by with a pot roast and some potatoes and a few loaves of homemade bread. Hilda did this, brought food to widows and orphans. The backseat of her car was filled with baskets for the poor that day. When she heard the argument, when she understood the situation, she told her brother that Dean would have to be put out immediately. “He’s a cancer, Mack, that needs plucking out. You know what has to be done.”
And Hilda should know, Mack thought. Hilda was a prayer warrior; she often told people this. And since his own prayers didn’t seem to be making it much beyond his ceiling in those days, he listened to her.
Dean left the next day.
The problem was that no matter how much Mack prayed, the decision to send Dean away had never felt right. It didn’t then. It didn’t now. He had to remind himself that God’s harsh judgments never feel right, but they must be meted out just the same.
“Never trust your feelings, Mack,” Hilda always said. “Trust your
faith.”
Mack heard footsteps beside him. He slowed and looked around.
“Hilda? Who are you talking about?” It was Mona, and she was hurrying to keep step with him. “I can hear you half down the block, mumbling, calling.”
“Just thinking,” he said.
“Who’s Hilda?”
“My older sister, long dead now.” He offered half of his umbrella.
“Ah, it sounds like to me,” she said, her voice breathless, “that she’s come back to haunt.”
“Maybe. Maybe she has. Maybe she never left. What’re you walking in the rain for anyway, Mona?”
“This is my afternoon off. Andy always covers for me so I can have my one night off. And then what happens? My daughter, she borrows my car. Doesn’t realize. So I’m on my feet all day and then have to walk home. Mandy, she says, ‘Take a cab, Nana.’ I say, ‘Mandy, those taxi cabs, they cost money.’ Young people, no understanding of money. None at all.”
“If we walk to my house, I could give you a lift home. I’m just around the corner.”
She waved her hand. “I know where you live, Mack.”
Her hair had come loose from her silk scarf and was blowing around her face. It was soft hair, not hard, metallic gray stiff curls like the hair on Doreen and some of the ladies in church.
“Oh, I put you to so much trouble,” she said. “It’s no trouble, really.”
“Ach, you’re a friend, Mack. Anybody tell you that?”
“Maybe if you haven’t had lunch we could go someplace.”
“Oh, let me tell you something. That sounds good. Eat someplace not the café. Oh, that sounds wonderful. First, let me change out of these clothes. I get covered in food spills.”
Over lunch, which happened to be the same restaurant Jeff and Sharon took him to the first night they were here, Mack told Mona all about Jeff’s new Little Mary theory.
She smiled, scrunching up her eyes. She had put red on her cheeks and lips, and it looked nice, not Jezebel-like at all. He had never allowed Rose to wear any makeup. Maybe he should have.
“First he thinks she’s crazy, no? And now, he thinks she had a baby?” When Mona talked, her whole face became expressive.
“And he thinks that Doreen is her daughter.”
“That little, funny woman, the one always hanging around you? She could be your niece?”
Mack frowned. “The whole thing was so secret. So secret. Nobody talked about it.”
“Ach, Mack, don’t you remember? Back then, back in our day, people did everything back then to protect good names. Nobody wanted any skeletons to come dancing out of the closets. Sorry thing is, most families had them. And now here, twenty, thirty years later, here they come all tumbling out.”