Fall on Your Knees (30 page)

“Frances? … Frances, let’s go up and look in the hope chest.”

But Frances is crying.

“Frances, do you want to give Raggedy-Lily-of-the-Valley a bath? You can. I’ll let you give her a bath if you want…. Do you want to wear my brace? You can, I’ll let you.”

Frances has dropped
My Gift to Jesus
. Lily picks it up and reads silently, poring over the bright pictures. When Frances feels better, Lily will ask her what INRI means. It’s the thing written on the scroll that’s always nailed at the top of Jesus’s cross. INRI.

I’ll ask Frances, thinks Lily. Frances will know.

Late that afternoon, Mercedes comes home crying too, but for a different reason. In the car she told Daddy it was because she and Helen had been talking about all the poor children in the hospital. James simply nodded. Mrs Luvovitz has informed him that girls of this age are likely to become emotional. The last thing one ought to do is tell them not to cry. He watched Mercedes get safely into the house, then he turned the car around and headed back downtown, having forgotten to drop by the post office.

Mercedes tiptoes up to her room and closes the door quietly. She doesn’t want to have to see anyone or explain anything. She lies face down and weeps into her pillow. Today a miner called Mr Davis was shot dead. There was a riot at the power plant out on Waterford Lake. The miners went there to flush out the company police and turn the water and lights back on for the town. The miners had sticks and stones and cinders. The police had guns and horses, but the miners won. Except that some got shot and poor Mr Davis who wasn’t even in the fight was killed. He was on his way home with milk for his youngest, they found a baby bottle in his pocket. Now there are seven more fatherless children in New Waterford.

But that’s not why Mercedes is crying. This afternoon, Helen Frye’s daddy came home with a bullet in his wrist. While Mrs Frye took the bullet out, Mr Frye took a long drink from a medicine bottle and told Mercedes that he was “most regretful, because I know you’re a nice girl, Mercedes. But I only have the one child, see, and I can’t have her associating with the Pipers.”

Mercedes’ eyes filled up and her face felt scalded. She felt mortified, as though someone had caught her in a shameful private act, but she could not think of anything she had done wrong. Mrs Frye just continued digging in Mr Frye’s wrist, while he turned white but didn’t flinch and spoke in a kindly voice, words that cut Mercedes apart. He said Mercedes’ father was a bad man. A bootlegger. A scab. An enemy of this town. Then Helen was told to go upstairs and Mercedes was asked to wait in the front room until her father came to pick her up in his automobile.

Now Mercedes curls onto her side and catches sight of Valentino perched in his frame on her dresser next to the china figurine of The Old-Fashioned Girl. Valentino invites fresh tears but they are tears of consolation. At least I still have you, my love. And The Old-Fashioned Girl reminds her how nice her daddy is. He is, he is a kind good man. And if —
if
— Daddy is forced to do certain things, it is only because he loves us so much and we don’t have a mother to look after us. Fresh tears. Mercedes can hear Mumma singing, and this is too much. She covers her head with the pillow and forces the sound from her mind. She banishes the memory and focuses on what is important: my family. Helping my father, who is a good good man; who looks after his crippled daughter all day long. If Mr Frye and everyone else could see Daddy with Lily, then they’d know.

Mercedes has grown calmer and her eyes drift now to the picture of Bernadette in the grotto with Our Lady of Lourdes. Bernadette has been beatified. Someday she will be a saint. They dug her up and she was sweet as a rose — that’s the odour of sanctity. She was a little crippled girl too. Maybe people hated her father as well.

Mercedes has cried herself almost to sleep, but before she tumbles under, a plan forms in her mind. Tomorrow she will take Lily for a walk. They will go together to the hospital — not to the wards, she doesn’t want Lily to catch anything, just to the reception area. And there Mercedes will have Lily give all their old story-books and clothes, as well as several pies that Mercedes will bake, to the poor children suffering upstairs. Then people will see…. What a good man….

It took James an unusually long time to drive to the post office because several streets were impassable. Rocks bounced off the hood of his automobile and a horde of young men descended and began to rock it to and fro. He gunned through them but found Plummer Avenue likewise swarming. A bunch of dismounted company police were being kicked, prodded and paraded towards the jailhouse. Women ran behind the prisoners, brandishing hat-pins and using them, too. There would be trouble tonight.

James drove to the Shore Road, parked and made it on foot through side-streets back to the post office. He could have put off the errand till tomorrow, but he considered that the post office and half the buildings on the main street might be burned to the ground by then, and he was expecting money.

He enters the post office, collects his cash and is about to leave when, “There’s a letter here too, Mr Piper.”

James reaches to take the envelope from the clerk. Mail is fairly rare. Packages and pictures sometimes come for Frances — James vets them before handing them over, he has confiscated more than one bottle of “Coca Wine: for brain fag and listlessness.” At the moment, the post office is buzzing with the day’s events and people are glued to the windows watching the mob go by, but it all fades to silent stillness around James as he catches sight of the name on the front of the envelope: Miss Kathleen Piper.

He loses consciousness for a split second. Like a blink inside the head, accompanied by the flash of a camera. Then the sound of excitement floods back in around him and for an instant he thinks the uproar is all about the fact that someone has sent a letter to Kathleen Piper. Someone has written to my daughter, not knowing — or perhaps knowing — she is dead.

Just the sight of her name. In letters scripted by a living hand, so unlike the letters carved in stone at the edge of town — this is why the light in his head flashed and faded on the fleeting notion that she was alive after all. That must be what insanity is like, thinks James. Except that the flash lasts for ever. Maybe that would be good.

He is back in the car before he can bring himself to open the letter. He remembers another letter so long ago. Anonymous. Horrible. It changed everything. He breaks the seal. He unfolds the page — a refined and ladylike hand. He reads:

Dear Kathleen,

I was so sorry to learn of your terrible accident. You are obviously a very brave girl. And you are also a lucky one to have such a nice father. Maybe one day you will be able to leave your wheelchair and run and play again. I hope so. Here is a signed photograph for your collection with my best wishes.

Yours truly,
Lillian Gish

James presses the electric starter on the Hupmobile and heads for home. He will take Frances out to the shed. And ask her to explain the joke.

That night, Mercedes, Lily and Daddy stand on the veranda and glimpse the torches processing through town. Frances is upstairs in bed with a damp cloth to her face. James has the car packed and gassed up in case they all have to leave in a hurry. The army won’t be here for another couple of days and, until then, it’s better to be prepared.

First the miners burn down Number 12 washhouse. Then they raid the company stores — they don’t burn them for fear of setting the whole town on fire. Then they go to the jailhouse to lynch the company police. But the priest meets them and talks them out of it. There are enough fatherless children in New Waterford.

to where your heart has ever been …

October 31, 1918

Dear Mr Piper,

Your daughter is in grave danger. Knowing Kathleen to be of good family and blessed with prodigious musical gifts, I feel it my duty to you and to the world to sound the alarm. Sir, you are from another country and perhaps fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the very term “miscegenation”. It is a modern evil and it is weakening the fabric of our nation. It now threatens to claim your own daughter. Through cunning seduction and flattery, your daughter has been ensnared in a net of godless music and immorality. I look on helpless to intervene because I am an invalid. I speak as one who knows to her own cost, when I say that by crossing nature’s divide, your daughter courts her own ruin and can end only by yielding to the dark remnants of the beast in man. It is, perhaps, not too late. She is yet young. It is your prerogative to ignore, yea to condemn the report of a stranger. My conscience dictates this letter. Thus discharged of my Christian duty, I remain,

An Anonymous Well-Wisher

since first you were my bonny bride …

Book 4

T
HE
O
LD
F
RENCH
M
INE

Lest We Forget

Lily’s foot is bleeding. She doesn’t know it, because the bagpipes are drowning out the pain. This is what bagpipes are designed to do. But even if she felt the pain and saw the blood soaking the back of her stocking, Lily would not stop marching, because she is on top of the world. She is carrying the Nova Scotia flag up Plummer Avenue. Her heart and lungs are big and plaid like the tartan bags of air that feed the pipes. And for once Lily’s type of walking is the ideal type. The sway and lilt of her unevenly matched legs go with the every-second-beat flex and swing of the music. Lily has a big open smile on her face and tears in her eyes — the pipes always make her feel tragic and elated all at the same time. With a poppy pinned to her tartan sash, she feels like a brave soldier. It’s November 11, 1929, Armistice Day. Today we remember The War to End All Wars.

New Waterford is out in force. Plummer Avenue is lined. Even James is out — not in his capacity as veteran, but as proud father. Mercedes stands at his side in front of Cribb’s Bookstore. Across the street, Luvovitz’s Kosher Canadian is closed, the blinds drawn down. There is no danger of them forgetting this day, but Mrs Luvovitz prefers them to do their remembering at home, far from the sights and sounds of Sacrifice and Honour. Frances is supposed to be here but she is at the Empire Theatre, watching Louise Brooks in
Pandora’s Box
again before the authorities get wind and it gets banned.