August was fifteen the summer Aggie believed she’d finally found their ticket out. Ernie Payne was seventy if he was a day, once something big in the next town over, now rattling around his fancy house like the last biscuit in the tin—wife buried, kids flown off, foundation beginning to give way. Ignoring his night blindness, he’d driven the long road to Aggie’s on a tip and presented her with the remnants of his desire. Half a dozen such trips and he’d been moved to declare his love—an old man’s love, passionate and possessive as a child’s.
Aggie could scarcely believe her luck. “I hardly have to do a thing,” she told August, laughing.
Ernie took them away to a fellow Elk’s cottage on the lake. They played family—Ernie the mildly cracked patriarch, Aggie his keeper, August the hollow-eyed teen. Aggie wore new cotton dresses sprinkled with flowery prints, shopped for groceries in the nearby town, prepared whatever sweet or greasy concoction Ernie craved. She kept the cottage neat as a pin, herself too, as though all those years she’d gone around with her dark hair coming loose, she’d been dying to wear it smoothed and fine. Of course, underneath all that tidiness lay Ernie’s needs. August got to know the look in the old man’s watery eye, went out wandering before he was told.
Brushing through a lakeside clearing one heated afternoon, he found himself surrounded by large, thin-winged flies. They cleared the way as he passed, lifting in shimmering waves, then sifting down to rest again among the nodding grass. They were legion. He found them clinging to bushes and trees, silvering a broken fence, a pile of discarded tires. Up close he discovered their loveliness, so many slender abdomens arched like lyres. Each one emitted the faintest all-over pulse, a minute, insistent surge, which, viewed en masse, set the whole field swimming like a sea.
At the Treat Shack, August accepted his heaping cone, laid Ernie’s shiny coins on the counter and, quite against character, heard himself ask, “What are they?”
There could be no doubt to which they he referred. The flies were so thick on the sky-blue clapboard, the treat lady had to thrust her fat hand out through a little door in the screen, scoop up the money and yank it back.
“Fish flies,” she answered, pulling a sick face. “I guess you’re not from around here.”
“They’re beautiful,” he murmured, to himself as much as her.
She snorted. “Not for long.”
There were more than enough rooms in the cottage for August to have one of his own, but he chose to remove himself, bedding down in the musty canvas tent he’d set up at the foot of the sloping yard. The fish flies covered it now. No longer a pasty yellow, his little home winked like mica in the gathering night. He left the door flaps rolled up so he could watch them on the screen, and beyond, the undulating body of the lake. He dreamt of wings, thousands of them, a soft translucence caressing him head to toe. Woke sweating, bewildered, his boxer shorts plastered to his thighs.
The tent was besieged. He didn’t dare step out for fear they would swarm him, so he let the shorts grow gluey against him, buried them shamefully early the next morning among the sand willows that sprouted from the beach.
The fish flies didn’t drink blood or suck sap or gnaw great, gaping holes in the trees. There wasn’t time. They were born, they mated, they died. Before long the ground was black with them. Aggie swept dark piles off the porch, thick bands marked the tide line, the lake grew a bobbing, blemished skin. They rotted like anything else. For a week August walked in misery, inhaling their carrion stink.
When Ernie fell down dead of a stroke while shaving, it came as no great surprise.
Mathilda saws three thin slices from the loaf and butters them with care. Dipping the ladle into the soup pot, she fishes for the prettiest chopped vegetables, the heartiest chunks of beef. After arranging the bread in a fan shape around the bowl, she carries Father Day’s lunch to the dining-room table, where she’s already laid a perfect place. She smiles at the sound of the front door. In the two months since she took over Vera’s duties, he’s never once been late for a meal.
She retreats to the kitchen, one ear cocked to the scrape of his chair. Leaning into the stove, she pours a dipperful of soup through the strainer, collecting the amber broth in a cup. On her way up the stairs she pictures him eating—dunking the bread so it softens, closing his lips on the spoon.
“There you are.” Vera struggles to raise herself up on the pillow. “Come here.”
Mathilda balances her tray on one hand, drawing the door closed behind her. “Don’t try and talk, Aunt,” she says gently. “You need your strength.”
“What for? To die?”
“Hush.”
“I won’t hush, I’ll have plenty of quiet soon enough.” She hooks a finger into the pocket of Mathilda’s apron. “I made myself an old maid for him, is that what you think?”
“No. No, Aunt.”
“Well, it wasn’t like that. He was God’s territory, all right, but I set up house in a little corner of him all the same. Like a squatter,” she says giddily, then sinks back into her pillow, spent.
A squatter? Mathilda pictures her aunt sitting neatly, almost daintily, in her chair before the fire, Father Rock pacing close with a fistful of pages, pausing now and then to mumble a line aloud, or to shove a scribbled passage between Vera’s gaze and the lacework in her lap. If Vera was a squatter, what did that make Mathilda—kneeling at the edge of the rug with the dogs splayed out between her and the hearth, or bent over her schoolbooks at the kitchen table, or staring holes in the blue rose wallpaper of her tiny room?
“I knew it was in there.” Vera’s voice makes her jump. “I’ve been having the pains for more than a year.”
Mathilda sets down the tray. “You knew?” She feels for the chair back and sits down hard.
Vera nods. “At first I thought it was my sin. You know, loving him—impurely for all those years. Who knows, maybe it is.”
“No!” The protest leaps from Mathilda’s mouth, startling them both. “I mean, you’re not—you’re a good woman.”
“Maybe.” Vera smiles thinly. “Anyway, whatever I thought, I fought it. Gritted my teeth when it flared up and forgot it the moment it settled down.” She pauses, her voice hollow when she speaks again. “I gave in to it when he died.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said, I gave in. More than that, I egged it on. When the pain came, I opened the gates and let it run. I’d lie in bed at night stroking where I thought the tumour might be.” She lifts her eyes to meet Mathilda’s horrified gaze. “It’s true. I talked to it, still do. Grow.” She pats her distended belly. “Come on, you little bastard, grow.”
Morphine’s softened the housekeeper—she looks up without a trace of hostility as August utters the entrance blessing and steps awkwardly into her room. Mathilda turns on her chair, watching him steadily in the vanity mirror.
“Leave us alone now,” the housekeeper says mildly.
“Yes, Aunt.” Mathilda rises, passing close by August on her way out the door.
“That’s not necessary,” he blurts. “I mean, family are welcome.”
But the housekeeper waves her chicken-foot hand. “Go on.”
Repeated visits haven’t steeled him to the smell. The sound of the door closing fills him with an acute and irrational dread, as though he’s just been sealed into a crypt. After a moment’s ignoble hesitation, he pushes the feeling aside and takes a lunging step toward the bed. He hurriedly arranges the Blessed Sacrament and the oil of extreme unction on the night table, then mumbles his way around the little room, shaking droplets of holy water on the sick woman’s belongings while avoiding her gaze.
Though her face remains placid throughout the following series of prayers, he can’t help but feel she’s waiting him out, uttering her responses by rote. Sure enough, her head bobs eagerly when he pauses after the last amen. She looks up at him through glittery eyes and rushes headlong into the sacrament of penance.
“Bless me Father for I have sinned.” She hesitates, and August bows his head politely. “It’s been—well, decades since my last real confession—”
He looks up sharply in time to catch the tail end of a twitchy little smile.
“—and since that time I accuse myself of these sins.” She takes a long, sucking breath. “I loved,” she says finally, “and I didn’t do a thing about it.”
August nods, dumbfounded. “Continue, my child.”
“That’s it.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes. Only—” Her breath quickens. “Only there’s something I wanted to ask you, Father.”
“Yes?”
“After we die—in heaven, I mean—are we the same?”
“The same?” He gathers his wits. “Well, death is the beginning of our true life, a life infinitely richer than that which we know on this earth.” He shoots a glance at her expectant face. “In heaven,” he continues, “God shows Himself clearly to those who are blessed—”
“Yes, yes,” she interrupts, suddenly fretful, “but what about us? Are we changed? Will we know each other? Will we know our—loved ones when we meet?”
“Oh. Well—”
“The thing is, Father, we never kissed.” She kneads a loose fistful of flannel sheet. “Do you think maybe, in heaven, I could kiss him?”
“Kiss him?” August draws back. “I shouldn’t think so,” he stammers. “Love is—different in heaven.”
“Different?”
“More spiritual, selfless. You won’t have the same—desires.”
“I won’t want to kiss him?” she asks, her voice forlorn.
“Well, yes,” August replies feebly. “I mean, no, you won’t.”
The housekeeper closes her eyes. “No,” she says quietly. “That can’t be right.”