Only when he’s back in Mercy—when he’s pulled up and braked out front of the rectory he calls home, cut the lights to let in the dark and cut the engine to let in the quiet—only then does August fully realize his mother is dead. It’s as though the past days’ events have been following him in a convoy, and are now piling into his back end with impact after impact—screaming rubber, wailing steel, exploding glass.
Wreckage.
The night drive there along poorly kept roads, this time feeling more than one furred body flatten beneath his wheels—seeing no deer, though, not a single, solitary deer. He hadn’t returned Father Felix’s call, knowing just how the old priest would put it—not a word of reproach, just the simple truth—she’s gone.
The top half of the casket stood open to display a powdery, cotton-packed approximation of her face. The once full lips were painted candy-floss pink, a little-girl shade Aggie wouldn’t have been caught dead in—except she was. August never got a look at the space where her breasts had been. The funeral parlour had fitted her up with a stuffed bra.
Father Felix departed from tradition, choosing to read first from Judges—Samson eating honey from the lion’s carcass—out of the strong came forth sweetness. Next came the Gospel of Saint Luke, how Christ let the woman who was a sinner cry on His feet and dry them with her hair, then kiss and anoint them with salve from an alabaster box. “ ‘Many sins are forgiven her,’ “read the old priest, ‘ “because she hath loved much.’ “The final passage came from Saint John, Christ saving the adulterous woman who was to be stoned. The Saviour stooping to write with His finger in the dust, then straightening, saying, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. Then, almost casually, stooping to write again.
Father Felix spoke the service softly, as there was only August to hear. Even the organist had begged off with a headache, so when the two priests sang Aggie’s favourite hymn, their voices rose unaccompanied to the vault.
Stabat Mater dolorosa
Juxta crucem lacrimosa—
August knew the English well—at the Cross her station keeping, stood the mournful mother weeping—but translating it to himself didn’t help. The sound was all he could understand. Stabat Mater. Stabat.
He bashes his forehead three times hard against the steering wheel, then slumps against it and finally weeps, crying first like a man, each sob something broken or torn, then like a child, surrendering, letting it rattle him like a window in a storm.
He wakes to a muted hammering, lifts his sore head slowly, orienting it toward the sound. Through the passenger-side window he can make out the glow of the flagstone path. Beyond the last stone, a slight figure, arms up over its head, pounding hard on the rectory door. A moment more and a panicked Mrs. Stitchen yanks it open wide, flooding the front stoop with light. A covered head, dark cloth falling in folds to the ground. August leans out across the empty seat beside him and rolls down the window for a better look, as though the glass was affecting his vision, somehow warping a normal human silhouette into the shape of a nun.
He sits back, confused. It is, of course, one of the Poor Clares from the monastery just south of St. Antoine. But their visiting chaplain is Father Beaubien. Perhaps something’s happened to the old Franciscan, or perhaps an extraordinary confessor is required. Either way, August has no choice but to step out of the car.
Mrs. Stitchen points over the nun’s shoulder, singling him out like a suspect in a lineup. “Oh, Father,” she calls anxiously, “you’re back—”
The nun whirls, her veil flying out to flap in Mrs. Stitchen’s face. “Father Day.” Her voice carries like the tolling of a bell. She hurries forward to meet him halfway on the path, each of them landing on a flagstone like a frog on a pad. “Father,” she says in a low voice, “there is a woman come to us at the cloister.”
“Yes?”
“A woman with child.” She looks up into his face, her eyes sweeping left to right, as if over a printed page.
His mouth works hard to make a sound.
“I delivered the infant,” says the Reverend Mother. “A healthy girl.” She hesitates before adding, “The mother is asking for you.”
The sound he finally manages approximates no known word.
She reaches up for his shoulder with a hooklike hand. “She’s in danger, Father.” Any doubt she may have had dissolves in the look on his face. “Take the northbound road out of town, it’s the first turnoff on the right once you’re through the bog.”
“The bog?” he stammers. “But what—how will I know—”
“The trees change.” She fixes him with a loaded stare. “They start looking as though they’re getting enough to eat.”
He nods dumbly.
Her hand turning him now. “I’ll send the doctor on after you.” Looking down at her sandals, she releases her grip. “I’ll give you a head start, Father, fifteen minutes before I go to the husband.”
August breaks for the car, no thought for what might be required of him—holy water, holy oil, holy bread. He goes empty-handed, an ordinary man.
The baby mews softly, bandaged to Mathilda’s belly with a length of torn and knotted sheet. She can’t trust the bicycle—it’s a wild animal beneath her, her blood darkening its spindly back. Besides, she can see headlights down the long lick of road. They’re coming for her. She dumps the bike in the rushes and lumbers into the raggedy trees.
August brakes late, spraying gravel up the monastery doors. He leaps from the car, hauls on the bell rope and hauls again, then mashes his face to the carved emblem, his eye too close to comprehend its form. He falls in when the door opens, a young sister half-catching him, softening the blow his knees receive.
“Oh, Father,” she wails, “I only went for more towels, she was bleeding so, and—oh, oh, she’s got the baby—oh, Father, I can’t see how she could have ridden it, but the bicycle’s gone!”
August doesn’t waste time answering. He struggles to his feet, takes the steps at a leap, hits the ground at a run. The Plymouth is too cumbersome, too unfeeling—he’ll use his own two legs to chase her down. When the cassock cuts into his stride, he tears it off, hammering on in T-shirt and trousers while it soaks up filmy water in the ditch.
He almost misses the bike. But for a glint from the roadside cattails he could easily have passed it by. She’s trampled a wake through the sedge. He tracks her into the trees, where springy moss and the dark eliminate any sign of her trail. “Mathilda!” he yells. When the bog offers no answer, he plunges on.
Time and again Mathilda stumbles, thrusts her hands out to clutch blindly for a branch or take the brunt of another fall. This time she hits moss, wet and cool about her fiery wrists. Accustomed to being belly-heavy, she remembers the baby only because it squeaks. Her brain simmers in its juice. She could’ve crushed it, the poor thing, gone lurching on with it bound to her, smothered and still.
She can’t be trusted. Struggling to her feet, she tears at the knotted bedsheet, worrying the little bundle free. It whimpers, and as if in answer the cloud cover parts to reveal a full-faced moon. The baby lights up. For the first time Mathilda really looks at it, finding no trace of its father, only a shadowy resemblance to herself. It’s practically bald, its eyes anonymous, a milky, newborn blue.
Mathilda looks up as though somebody’s spoken her name. Not ten paces away, a tall, hairy evergreen stands slightly apart. Halfway up its trunk, a branch beckons like a human arm.
It’s mostly pines up here, higher, drier ground. Castor stands on unsteady legs, gazing down on the shaggy, sway-backed expanse of the bog. Black spruce dog, he thinks, grinning at the idea.
“Ya miss me?” he shouts. “Been waitin’ for ol’ Castor to come home?” Then stumbles forward into a bald spot, slips on the long, slick needles and falls flat on his ass. He’s not hurt. Truth be told, he can’t even feel his behind, like when you pass out sitting up in a car.
“Sonofabitch.” He giggles, tipping the brandy to his mouth. The sky’s dirty with clouds, but just now there’s a fair wedge of moon showing through. It glints in the sloshing amber, flashes in the glass, and before Castor can blink, his eye has broken away.
It lands in a drop of sap, opens on a timber wolf up on its hind legs against a tree. There’s something above it in the branches, but the angle’s bad—a blob of white is all Castor can make out. The wolf drops to all fours. It’s a loner, a stranger to the local pack, and therefore skittish, snout lifting, ears pricked to the threat of its own kind. The moss under its feet is pale. The wolf lowers its nose to a dark patch, sniffs, then snuffles. Draws its lips back and licks.
Castor’s eye snaps back. He slumps forward, hanging his head. Run up a tree, he thinks mournfully. Trapped.
He knows the tamarack—it’s one of several with deformed tops, the mark of the sawfly grub. This one like a slender, headless woman, arms raised as though she’s looking to dance. But where? He searches his brain, squinting inwardly through a yellow, soupy mist.
Thomas faces the killing-room wall, where a dozen headless domestic rabbits hang by their right hind legs. He cuts off twenty-four small front feet at the first joint, moving rapidly down the row. Carves off their tails on the way back, then scores around the hooked feet, leaving each a fuzzy white sock. One by one he slits all twelve pelts along the inner legs. The first comes loose with a tug, pulling free of the rabbit to hang flaccid in Thomas’s hand.
Chances are the Varguses will be glad to let him keep a couple of pelts in lieu of pay. He smiles, picturing little arms circling a fluffy grey neck. How hard can it be to make a bear? He’s a fair hand with a needle and thread, having practised on hundreds of roasts. He’ll sew two arms, two legs, a belly, a furry-eared head. For stuffing, he can tear up a few old cloths, ones that are stringy or stained.
A sudden racket sounds next door in the shop, someone hammering hard on the storefront glass. It irks him. He pictures Mathilda upstairs, perhaps startled from a heavy sleep.
“Hold your water,” he mutters, tossing the pelt on the table and wiping his hands. He steps out of his high slaughter boots at the threshold of the shop and pads quickly to the glass door, still shaking under some idiot’s fist. He yanks on the blind, sending it flying up wildly around the roll.
It’s a nun. A goddamn, honest-to-god nun.
Thomas holds a finger to his lips, fumbling with the lock while she gestures at him through the glass. The bell jangles wildly as he hauls open the door.
“Sister,” he begins, “uh, Mother, please, my wife isn’t well upstairs.”
“She’s not upstairs.”
“What?”
The story comes apart in his ears. Bicycle. Convent. Baby. He takes leave of his senses. Takes the old nun by the shoulders, lifting her like a goose-down pillow. For several seconds he can neither hear nor see.
The nun’s sandalled feet dangle in the air. Thomas lets her down easy but doesn’t let go, sagging forward as though her sinewy frame is all that’s holding him up. “I’m sorry,” he croaks. “Where is she?”
That’s it, all right. That’s the tree. Slim and curvy with a missing crown, uppermost branches held high. No sign of the wolf, but Castor’s no fool. It will have heard him and slipped away between the trees. He yanks his knife from its sheath—it’s no small thing to come between a wolf and its food. It’s probably watching him right now. Or else he’s too late. What about that? What if the wolf and whatever it was after are already gone?
He’s well and truly loaded. With only the moonlight, and that coming off and on, he should be flat on his face by now. Thank the Lord for bog legs. He’s a sailor on a mossy sea.
He makes the tamarack, holds a hand out to steady himself against its trunk. After that it’s a good minute before he remembers why he’s there and looks up, startled to find neither animal nor bird after all. It’s more like the cocoon of a giant moth. He reaches for it, rises up on his tiptoes, even jumps, half a dozen jester leaps before he falls. The knife grazes his numbed belly. Another mark to find in the morning, run his finger wonderingly down its length.
He pulls himself up by a low branch, spots the soiled knife in his hand and, forgetting the wolf, shoves the blade peevishly away. Climbing’s not really his strong point. The first branch is a picnic, but the next is a stretch. His fingers aren’t up to it. They clasp too soon and clutch the air, unbalancing him so he teeters and tips. His face meets trunk. It hurts him bluntly, somewhere distant, the bridge of someone else’s nose.
Another near fall, and then it’s third time lucky and his scabby hands catch hold. It’s darker among the boughs, but the thing gives off an eerie glow. Hauling himself up level with it, he suddenly feels unsure. What if it is a cocoon? What the hell kind of bug spins itself a basket like that?
The thing lets out a sound, halfway between a gurgle and a squeak, which in turn rings a bell in his head—Renny beside him on the mattress, waving his little fists.
“Jesus,” Castor breathes. He lifts the swollen bundle from its crook. Another squeak, a splutter, and it lets loose with a hair-raising wail. Castor lets out a yelp of his own, presses it to his chest and somehow monkeys his way down.
Back on land, he parts the mess of cloth for a peek at its face. A howling mouth, the rest still red and pruney. The little beggar’s brand new—still used to a belly, and God only knows how long it’s been wedged in that tree.
A splotch on the white startles him. Then another, spreading and merging with the first. Blood? Blood! He panics, fumbles and almost drops it, horrified by what’s seeping through. Then a breeze touches his face. Nosebleed. He laughs out loud. Dammit, he ought to know the feel of one by now.
The cloth’s no good anyway. It’s too thin, all lumps and loose threads, and it must be wound around the poor mite a dozen times. He lays the screaming parcel on the moss and struggles out of his mangy fur vest. It might be old, a little grubby even, but it’s the softest thing he’s got.
He unwraps the newborn slowly, loop after loop, the over-careful hands of a habitual drunk. She’s flawless. He gazes at her—all that tiny, unbridled rage—then folds her in the vest, lifts and holds her close, feeling her quiet against him.
His nose is bleeding freely now. He wipes it on one end of the knotted sheet, then reaches up into a nearby spruce for a hunk of old man’s beard. Shoving it up his nostrils, he gives his baby a gentle squeeze. Gets his bearings and heads for home.
Hell-bent for the monastery, Thomas hits a washboard on a turn, foot to the floor. No time to correct—the tires slip sideways in their ruts, meet the dirt shoulder, spin out of control. A sickening lurch, a squeal, and the truck’s belly up in the ditch.
He crawls from the wreck and hauls himself up through the cattails, miraculously unharmed. A little disoriented, maybe. Stars in his skull and overhead, marring the country dark. He looks right, then left. The road exactly the same both ways.
“Heavenly Father,” August pants, but the word cracks open inside him. Father. His own left before August was born, so the one memory he has can’t be real. It’s like a picture taken through the bars of his crib. It could be any man, except that August knows. His father has jet-black hair and a narrow back. A red plaid shirt, long arms hanging from its rolled-up sleeves.
And hasn’t August been the same—no earthly good, just a stick man turning his back? He stops, hands braced on his knees, bent gasping, almost retching, for air. His shoes and socks are gone, sucked off his feet by the bog.
Who’s my daddy? He asked it only once. The boys at school had told him it was like when a stray bitch had a litter—so many dogs got at her, sometimes even a coyote, there was no way to know for sure.
Aggie pointed up through the water-stained ceiling. God’s your daddy now. So that was him. Sometimes a checkered back through wooden bars, more often whatever lay on the other side of that enormous airy dome, staring down at him through its ever-changing eye.
August lifts his head, still panting. Which way?
He closes his eyes briefly, sees himself in full vestments, stationed at the baptismal font. In nomine Patris. Holy water thrice-poured, the baby’s tears, then the mother’s—yes, the mother’s tears, for close beside him stands Mathilda, her face flushed and happy in the red waves of her hair. Looking at her, August suddenly realizes, not just any baby, my baby, and he hugs it closer, bending his face to its innocent breath. All at once the rushing weight, the sweet burden of fatherhood. Claim her.
The ground is resilient for a few steps, then rotten, the sphagnum nothing but a surface to break through. Over and over he goes down, moss slapping him in the face like a sour sponge, and still he rises and slogs on, taking as straight a course as the trees allow, until even the trees won’t hold still. He freezes, watching them shudder in a spreading black circle, those closest leaning into him and away. This is it, he thinks numbly, this is what it is to be mad.
It’s not the deformed tree that catches his attention so much as the length of mottled cloth at its feet. Looped and wavy, it scrawls a long, indecipherable word across the moss. At its tail, in place of a period, the bloody approximation of a paw. Like a dog’s, only worse. August recognizes wolf in some ancient chamber of his brain.
He shuts his eyes. Sways on the spot, listening hard with his whole body, sounding the depths of the bog.
Nothing.
It’s what he should have expected. Both dead. Both in a state of sin—the baby unbaptized, the mother unabsolved.
He stoops to take up one end of the cloth, holds a dark patch to his nose and breathes deeply, the odour a downward pull, a pure opposite to the heady lift of wine. Slowly, ceremoniously, he feels his way along its knotted length, feeding it blotched and spattered through his hands. The far end is spotless but for a few clinging shreds of moss. Here he imagines he can smell traces of the baby’s skin, impossibly fresh. He straightens. Loops the tail back on itself in a noose.
August shins up the tree with ease, a kind of animal joy even, his body remembering how. He picks a dependable limb, glancing down to confirm that the height exceeds his own.
He sees all three of them during the short drop—his mother, Mathilda, the daughter he’ll never know. His neck snaps mercifully. His naked feet kick and swing.
Safe in the bottle house, Castor uses what little energy he has left to empty the dregs of Renny’s gift down his throat. The kerosene lamp flickers beside him, licking up through the last of the brandy, sending his eye bouncing off through the night. Not much out there. A host of trees. A dangling shadow, black and white.
He curls down over the blue-eyed infant in his lap. His breath hollows out, and soon boozy bubbles are slapping against his lips. Extra-proof drool falls in long, glossy drops. Tainted and sweet, they splash softly on her delicate skull.
Mathilda staggers through endless underbrush, her nightgown a soggy tangle, part bog water, part fever, part blood. The wolf follows at a discreet distance, hanging back whenever she falls.
Nothing but trees. They’re inside her now, humped and shaggy, spreading roots in her belly, swaying crowns in the vault of her brain. If only it would cry. She could retrace her steps then, follow the thread of its plaintive noise. “Cry, baby,” she whispers. “Come on, cry.”
Out of nowhere, a clearing. She stumbles into its near-perfect circle, a subtle depression in the endless carpet of moss. “BABY!” she screams. “BAY-BEEE!”
What seemed solid beneath her is not. There’s nothing to grab hold of when the bog opens and swallows her whole.