2

THE HOUSE SMELLS STALE, as if she’s been away a lot longer. On stove and counter sit the pots and withered cukes, the first round of jars standing in their dingy water. Harry would be disappointed; at least, unlike her, he wouldn’t fret over the waste. All her industry feels like it happened weeks ago now; it’s like turning on the TV at the end of a show.

Upstairs, the bedspread lies balled up on the floor. In their room, the sheets are rumpled. The only signs of orderly cheer: the small varnished cross above her dresser, her candy dish full of earrings. A vanity. At sixty-eight, at Rebecca’s urging, she’d got her ears pierced. “Ma, if Harry can have his accordion…” The girl at the beauty parlour had promised it wouldn’t hurt, and it hadn’t. But still she felt silly, as if the holes were some sort of pampered stigmata, and Harry’s teasing hadn’t helped: “My wife the Christmas tree; look at the dingle balls on her, wouldja.” But for their fiftieth wedding anniversary he’d handed her a bag from Consumers Distributing: a pair of teeny diamond studs. Harry Caines!

Removing them, carefully replacing the backs, she sets them in the dish, then slips to his side of the bed, where the Don Noble takes up a chair. Shiny as foil Christmas wrap, its red veneer feels sticky-smooth to the touch. Harry’s scent is all over the pillow: the smell of Old Spice and cigarettes and something else, just him, as she stretches out, closes her eyes. God will excuse her lying down for this; he should, knowing all about her knees. A chill breathes through the screen, the evening’s coolness tinged with fall, and with each wisp of air she tries to imagine him, or someone, listening.

But it’s hard to concentrate on prayer: her mind keeps lurching back to Harry, not lying on the bathroom floor or in the sterile white bed, but perched on a kitchen chair chugalugging beer and squeezing out tunes one after another, laughing till his molars showed, including the one he’d ended up having pulled. And suddenly there’s his eye, the artificial one, which she can almost picture now, a relic, like a kewpie doll’s, rolling among her earrings, its flat blue lacking the gleam of his right one; and she can even hear him joking, coming home from cleanings and fittings at the doctor’s. How next time he’d pick brown and be like a mutt with a mismatched pair: “How’d you like them peepers? Put that in your cup and drink it, dolly!”

Better, safer, to imagine the marble, Robert’s marble and his baby voice: “Nanny, I waaant it.” Until in her mind it clouds and grows oblong and opaque as a Scotch mint—a mint rolling in a film of blood. Much as she resists, as fast as the mantra of prayer puts up a wall, the memories topple it. And when she glances up at the dark panes, she can almost see them shattering—over and over and over, a wave of diamonds breaking inwards—and Harry holding the razor to his cheek, turning, both of his eyes blazed wide open.

Oh Danny Boy: if she clamps her teeth and forces air into both ears she can summon his voice and let it fill her head—enough to squeeze out the blackness. Like driving out the enemy, bolting doors—enough to let herself drift off, anyway. Dozing through darkness takes practice, but she has an arsenal of that. Arse-nal, the syllables swagger through her brain, another round of Harry’s voice, as if he’s yelling arsehole, insulting somebody from inside his hospital sleep…

But sometime in the night she’s shaken awake by crying: her own. Harry? Flinging out an arm, reaching for him… But there’s only the chilly sheet. Her head pounding. The emptiness of the bed a burden, after fifty-five years of sharing it. Somewhere in the dark a truck throttles downhill. By no means is it the first time she’s felt so alone, but now the quiet is like a body falling through space. Or a snowball trundling downhill, gathering weight.

The little Ben at the bedside says 4:30; in its greenish glow her mind grows tentacles, like the tubes that she pictures trailing from Harry in his cold white bed. Choking off his voice and her reason, they latch on to rubble best left buried, snowed or grassed over. But like rocks growing in the garden, the rubble leaches upwards through dust and cobwebs the colours of dawn, if dawn ever comes. There are worse things than dying, way worse, and knowing it knocks her down, it no longer matters if she’s waking or sleeping, all but defenceless against memory’s wave.

Good thoughts, good thoughts: her will bubbles at first in protest, a fierce effervescence. And so it floods back: a flash of light at first, for the only way to begin her freefall is with white. A snowy hill in the background, whiteness solid as a drumlin, Citadel Hill an upside-down bowl....

1917

FOR SNOW HAD FLOWN THE night she gave birth; covering the hill and everything else, it pushed and stung and drifted. Tent walls flapped, men shouted, sweeping them off. The wind yowling like a cat as she’d laboured. A goddamned tomcat, someone said, as God whitewashed the wreckage. He was present when the baby came, and only he had known how the Jesus she’d got there, because she didn’t, shunted through piles of matchsticks to a forest of tents.

Canvas shifted like sand near her face, its smell a comfort as hands worked over her. Freezing hands. Dubbin and the stink of kerosene, a thread of warmth; and in her mind she’d been a schoolgirl again. Grade two, Richmond school, the kid beside her crawling with cooties. Next she’d been home stoking the stove, in the flat on Campbell Road, cracking eggs…

“Breathe!” the dove had cooed, tending her. A nursing sister veiled in grey. “Push!”

Breath chugging out like a screaming locomotive’s plume. Mama? MAMA? There’d been no Mama. But her body’d remembered what to do, no trouble at all jerking up those bloodied knees till the cold had nipped her backside. Push! And quickly, too quickly, the baby’d come.

“Some fast for a first. A boy,” somebody said. A boy? Her first? A mistake, surely, wrought by the wind’s caterwauling, and weeping from the other tents. Her lungs like slob ice; for an instant, she’d quit breathing.

“Poor little critter—it’ll freeze to death, we don’t get ’em moved.”

But before she could argue, before she could explain the difference, they were swaddled in filthy blankets, madonna and child, and moved.

The whisk of runners carving tracks away from the hill and the tent village resembling a sea of Christmas trees huddled at its foot.

But that was as far as whiteness went.

The sky had rained tar earlier, what, a morning before? A lifetime? Tar and blood and needles of glass. It’d wept chunks of earth and flaming metal when she came to on a hill: another, smaller one way across town from the overturned bowl. One boot on, one boot off, she’d found herself lying there arse over teakettle, limbs splayed. Barelegged, knees big as softballs oozing purple.

No sign at all of the itchy grey stockings she’d just pulled on, slouching over her cannonball belly. Gut in her throat, as Harry’d yelled—

“Cufflinks. You seen my—?”

Her shirtwaist wrung like a dishrag, every last button gone. Toes facing uphill, hands and feet the points of a compass rose. Blood drummed her ears as a mushroom grew in the sky, a giant, spreading fungus that crowded out the sun. The spiky grass grazed her cheek: an inch from her eye a bedspring, and something else, unspeakable, purple, with suckers trailing from it like a jellyfish’s. A hand?

Pinning her there, a buoy, the baby’s weight on her back had made her pant.

Mama? Dad? Harry? she’d screamed and screamed, till no sound came out.

AS THE AIR LIGHTENED—GRUEL THINNED with water—its stillness seared her. Not a breath of wind, not a wisp. In the mushroom’s shadow, the view was like a pot left on the stove, the bottom burnt right out. Somewhere far below lay the greasy gleam of water. Blood from a gash stained her vision pink, the vision of a cellar dredged clean to China; trees smoking gallows. Curled like a snail, she groped for her name, the day. Limbs starfished, the baby pressing her spine, she flailed for a location.

Harry was getting his tooth out, wasn’t he, the appointment booked for the sixth…?

Rag dolls dangled from wires, wires like skipping ropes: a cockeyed game of double dutch? Washing stuck in a trapeze. Voices yelling in her head: Liar, liar, pants on fire, couldn’t get over the telephone wire…

Dolly, you must’ve put ’em somewhere. When you washed my shirts?

Our Father. Our fa-ther. Dad?

Mama?

Sis? Ethel?

Her big round belly a buoy.

A front-room radiator, a stove pipe, a piano’s keyboard lay there too: a junkyard trail. If she followed the pieces they’d lead her home? Thoughts ricocheted. A war zone! A newsreel had spun, like the box office hit that might even come to the Strand, The Battle of the Somme, and dumped her into its mud. The Huns. The work of the Kaiser—the Krauts!

Oh sweet Jesus and all that’s good, they’d been bombed, and why would the devil give a goddamn if it was Wednesday or Thursday?

Something squirmed: a fish inside her?

Harry? Harry Caines?!

FOUR FORTY-FIVE IN THE MORNING, there’s nothing for it but to get up. Useless, lying here in this black bog.

Downstairs, glancing off the cupboards her voice is as artificially bright and jarring as the overhead light. “I’m calling about my husband?” It takes fewer muscles to smile than to frown, she’s heard somewhere—maybe it’s the priest who’s said it—therefore it takes less energy. The new fellow at St. Columba’s. That earnest voice of his seems to coax from inside her as the nurse, or whoever, answers, puts down the phone. Believe, he’s always saying, because believing makes it so.

“No change. I’m sorry.” The nurse’s news is a scalpel wiped in compassion. Officious enough that Lucy listens, foolishly, for Harry’s voice. But all she hears is

Have you seen my. Shaving brush. My. Cufflinks…?

The pickles wait on the counter; they haven’t gone anywhere. Just as well. A desperate energy fills her: like the “zest” she used to get when her period started, and then when it finally ceased. Keep busy, busy: if she buckles down, the dills might be saved yet. A treat for Harry, when he gets out. The little frogs are wizened, yellowed, but firm enough to justify starting over.

There’s just enough vinegar to try again. “Square one, Harry,” she declares, as if he’s there. A clean slate—if only. If only troubles could be sucked like water up a hose.

ON THAT BARE SLOPE HER unborn baby had kicked and jabbed her back to life. Her eyes jammed open like a shutter: roofs ripped off like box tops. Clothes spilled from open-eyed windows, laundry that should’ve billowed, would have, hung out that morning. Early, early. The pulse of early had beat in her neck as she vomited.

The only one in the entire world spared.

Harry, eyeing that tooth in the mirror…

The air had tasted of roasted iron. As it cleared, in the starless, backwards black, bonfires had sprouted. Boy Scouts? The whiff of scorched meat. But like a genie, like a scent released from a porcelain bottle, it had enveloped and pulled her to her feet. Her face felt sunburned, one ankle like a pincushion, a gash where her boot would’ve buttoned, and her knees… It was as if a leg, an arm, a foot, a hand, something had been amputated, and yet, she counted, she could see, none were missing. Her tears were soot: of course she was dreaming. She’d wake, and find herself back on Campbell Road, poaching eggs.

Knife-sharp, the rising wind had shoved her downhill to what remained of the street. A house flagging like cardboard, gusts playing the staircase that dangled by a nail. Turning a corner marked by a picket, she’d passed a cow: an upside-down bathtub, its feet like hoofs. Her ears rang, a dull whining drone, and as she tripped past what looked like a drawer, the wind wailed just like a baby. Picking her way round a horse’s fetlocks, she’d heard it again, a whimper. But then a foghorn moaned, and something had staggered out of the darkness towards her. A man, buck naked, skin curling from his bones like wood from an awl. His eyes were holes, his hands pawing at nothing. His cries a rattle of blood: Help me.

The wind had pushed harder, and she’d limped and wallowed faster. The moon had appeared, a hazy eye atop a swaying wall. Tiny heels pummelled her lungs, and squatting, she’d dreamed, no, heard, a miracle. Voices. Angels, faint at first, then shouting. Men. Shimmying wheels.

She’d no longer felt her knees; even her belly had grown weightless. Almost airborne…missing, missing…

Words. That homey, lazy drawl: Haligonian not Deutsch: “Keep yer jesus shirt on. Can’t do nothin’ for that poor bastard; leave him.”

Here. Her voice a croak, the crackle of a tiny flame. Then louder. Loud enough to quicken the dead. Please.

The soldiers had loaded her into a cart with a woman clutching something in a towel. The poor creature could have been a Hun, for her lack of expression. Someone wrapped Lucy in his coat, held a flask. Brushfire had ripped down her gullet; she could’ve kissed each finger of his bloody glove. Her neck snapping to the horse’s lope, eyes pinned on the blue of its flanks, she’d given herself up, and been hauled from the lip of hell up Agricola Street…

DAWN BREAKS AS SHE LADLES in fresh brine the colour of the liquid that’d been dripping into Harry’s vein. Drip drip drip: she can almost feel a stinging yet invigorating chill entering her own body. As she seals the jars, re-boils them. That sound again: her voice, praying. One long looping Our Father. He has to pull through; he can’t not.

The pop of each cooling lid buoys her, buoys her more than she might’ve hoped. He’ll make it, says each tiny burst, each lagging beat marking the fridge’s melodious drone with a cockeyed percussion. Believe, it yells, and dawn sweats through the curtains, a pale flush. Humbled, blushingly optimistic as the sun begins to scale the wall, she digs out her biggest bowl and mixes porridge bread: Harry’s absolute fave. Criminy, she hasn’t made it in years.

“It’ll be all right,” she murmurs, kneading. Her hands are stubby as driftwood punching the dough; but the motion of her fists sinking into it suddenly, with no warning at all, pulls down tears. It’s the ghost of loss. “I could kick your arse, Harry,” she’d like to blame him, “your Londonderriere.” Sticky fists in her eyes, her choking laugh graces the air’s shadowy, yellowing blue. O Danny Boy! Luckily only God can hear. Think white, think snow, he shouts back, at least the voice inside her does, the voice that she’d like to consider his. So she obeys. But then there’s no stopping it, the whiteness of snow on canvas melting to a dismal grey…

A SHIP’S ON FIRE, SOMEBODY’D hollered first thing that deadly bright cold morning—the fellow in the flat downstairs? And she’d thought, Good, that’s as good a place as they could get for a fire, on water. And that had been it for a warning…

“Lucy, wha’d you do with my goddamn cufflinks?” Harry’d bellowed.

No time to answer, or even to back from the stove…

Pieces of sky like smelts, a blackened silvery red streaming down…

And then the tent, the flapping cold, a frozen confusion. Some fast for a firstborn, wha’? Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a small mercy, nope, a miracle she went the way she did, not a hitch. Loaded onto the sleigh, this boy creature bundled to her like a foundling, yet both her hands, if not sliced right off, then utterly, utterly empty.