Finton Moon (2 page)

Finton Moon was a spring baby with a natural propensity for falling.

In his younger years, Finton loved to hear the story of when he was born, but the constant revision of details worried him—his parents, Elsie and Tom, sometimes forgot the doctor's name, the number of nurses, or the time of delivery. There weren't any pictures either—not of his mother's pregnancy nor of Finton's infancy. Sure, his parents didn't own a camera, but he wondered if some relative might have taken a photograph or two. Still, he wouldn't inquire too deeply. He was terrified of discovering an awful truth: that it didn't happen the way they said it did, or that he'd actually never been born at all.

According to Elsie, when Finton was born, the nurse dropped him on the bed and said, “Oops!” But he didn't cry. “You just lay there,” his mother told him. “Deep, blue eyes, just lookin' at us all like you had a hundred questions.” She shook her head and put a hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh. “You were quiet as dirt.” The nurse scooped him up and examined him, but there wasn't even a mark on his tiny body.

According to Elsie Moon, the delivery was easy—a mere forty-five minutes from first contraction to famous first fall. “Time enough for a good shit,” her husband Tom added as he sat at the kitchen table smoking a Camel and projecting a wispy grey “O” of smoke into the air. Nanny Moon peered up from her Bible, silver-rimmed glasses perched on her nose, and mused that her newest grandchild was merely doing penance for the fall of man. “'Twas just as well he get used to the cruelty,” she liked to say, then returned her gaze to the consoling lines of the Good Book.

In the rest of the story, he didn't cry until two days after he was born. “The moment I set foot on that doorstep,” Elsie said, “you started yowling to beat the devil—and we thought you'd never stop.” For the next twenty-four hours, nothing—not his mother's coddling, his father's swearing, his grandmother's prayers, nor his brothers' funny faces—could halt the howling.

She deposited him in the hall closet with the door closed, but an hour later she took him out and set him in the back room that was undergoing construction. “Tom's a wonder for startin', but he never finishes,” his wife often said. When Elsie went to fetch him, she noticed that the crib had attracted several spiders. “Nasty buggars,” she clucked as she brushed them away and sent the ugly creatures scurrying back to the shadows.

Five-year-old Clancy suggested they sing, but Elsie frowned as she jostled Finton in her tired arms. “I don't know any songs,” she said.

“Elvis!” Clancy began hopping around and swiveling his hips, singing, “Since my baby left me!” into his fisted right hand. Elsie shook her head and cleared her throat before trying “Love Me Tender,” which only heightened his bawling. “Amazing Grace” caused the child to gag until his face turned a light shade of blue, which nearly sent his mother into a panic. Resisting the urge to shake him to a more natural hue, she forced out an “Irish Lullaby,” which only made him cough and spit as he clenched his upraised fists in mounting frustration.

It was Tom who snatched him up by the armpits and crooned, “You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You,” while both boys, the mother, and even Nanny Moon hummed along on the chorus. Finton stopped coughing from the middle of “somebody,” ceased choking on “loves” and slowly abated his whimpering by the end of the first verse. Before the song was done, the vexed baby committed to slumber, the sign of which was the steady rise and fall of his tiny chest with every life-affirming breath. “A bloody miracle,” the grandmother whispered as she blessed herself.

“Thanks be to Jesus,” Elsie Moon declared. He slept through the night and, from that day on, Tom's version of the Dean Martin ballad became Finton's lullaby even though no one knew why that song, and seemingly no other, would serve.

And that, more or less, was the story of Finton's birth.

Confirmation

Morgan Battenhatch, the eleven-year-old babysitter, kissed Finton's forehead and buried her nose in his little neck, inhaling the dueling smells of sweet talcum powder and Sunlight soap from his freshscrubbed skin. “He's adorable, Mrs. Elsie.” She cooed and cradled him in her confident arms as she crossed the threshold to take him to church on the first Sunday morning in April—Finton's first mass. The child gazed up at the underside of Morgan's chin, occasionally waving a chubby hand at the split ends of her straight, blonde hair and warbling a pleasant, private language.

“Poor Morgan,” Elsie Moon would say whenever she recounted the event. “She was always a bit…
strange
.”

“Finton was the sacrifice,” Nanny Moon would become fond of saying, glancing under her glasses from her knitting or the Bible.

Morgan was being confirmed that day at the Sacred Heart of Mary church, and Finton's presence would render the occasion more auspicious. “Poor Morgan,” as she was often called, looked quite refined for a girl whose mother was a witch and whose father had died when she was a child. Given the squalor of the Battenhatch house, no one questioned Morgan's preference for eating the occasional meal with the Moons, and now that they had Finton, it gave the girl something to keep her occupied. The Moons, simply put, were her anchor in the world. “It's like bringing the savage to God,” said Nanny Moon. At a young age, Morgan spent a lot of time with the Moon women, learning about religion, men, and the evils of the world. She didn't get along with her own mother and, almost imperceptibly, she had gained the status of unofficial adoptee and babysitter.

With Finton nestled in her arms, she proudly stepped over the threshold in a perilously long, white dress. Because of the heat, Elsie had shortened the sleeves of the second-hand garment, but she had neglected to hem it for ease of gait. The two siblings—Clancy and Homer—were already stuffed into the sweltering Valiant, where they squabbled over the back seat. While Clancy repeatedly punched him in the shoulder and ordered him to sit up, three-year-old Homer lay stretched across the seat, determined to have it all to himself. Their father leaned indifferently against the side of the car, stealing a last cigarette before committing to the drive. Their mother, meanwhile, was rummaging through her black handbag, preparing to leave the house and asking, “Now have ya got everything, girl?”

Morgan's occupied arms were trying to nudge Elsie through the door. “Yes, ma'am.”

“Prayer book?”

“In my purse.”

“Got yer purse?”

“Yup.” She hoisted her right shoulder as evidence.

“Envelope?” The envelope contained money for the church collection. Elsie had laid it on the fridge, and Morgan had forgotten to slip it into her bag.

“Shit!” She wheeled around, an abrupt about-face motion that instigated an unfortunate chain of events. Morgan's weak knees, shaky hands, and silky white gloves combined with the forward momentum of tripping in her hem to generate a thrust and lift that launched the child into the bright April air, a flight that was aborted by the kiss of his tender cheek on the jagged corner of the concrete doorstep. His blanket picked up some pebbles as his tiny body rolled over three times, falling away from the step.

He did not cry, but lay peeping up at them from the ground, dazed and confused. “He's bleeding!” Morgan squealed as she rushed forward.

“Oh, bloody Jesus, he's gonna lose an eye!” Elsie nudged the girl aside and snatched up the child. “You'll be a state, girl, if ya handles him.”

Mistrustful of her daughter-in-law's maternal abilities, and equally suspicious of any physician as young as Abel Adams, the grandmother insisted on accompanying them to the hospital. Since Morgan still had to be confirmed, Tom dropped child, mother, and grandmother off at Emergency. “Church would do him more good,” Nanny Moon clucked to no one as she sat in the waiting room, smoothing her starch-stiff, blue dress with her white-gloved hands and needlessly straightening the brim of her straw hat. “Nothing heals proper without God's help.” Tired of being ignored, she took out her Bible and read.

“Nothing for me to do,” Adams shrugged. He had arrived in his lime-green softball uniform, complete with catcher's knee and chest pads. Finton's bleeding had subsided before they reached the hospital, and the cut had closed over by the time Adams could be reached. Upon carefully checking the baby, the doctor declared, “He's healing fine on his own. Take him home and…” Adams glanced at the grandmother, leaned in closer to Elsie, and lowered his voice. “I'd be more careful with him if I were you.”

“The nerve of that quack,” Nanny Moon muttered on the way home in the taxi. She was just as perturbed by Adams' whispering as by his warning, which Elsie relayed as they waited for the cab. The mortified mother sat fuming in the back seat with Finton staring up at her with his guiltless blue eyes. When Elsie finally could stand his gaze no longer, she averted her eyes to the passing scenery. As they passed the Battenhatch house, she glanced worriedly at Nanny Moon, who pretended not to notice.

“Adams says Finton healed him
self
.”

Tom Moon sat at the kitchen table where he practised blowing Camel rings. He watched disinterestedly as Elsie placed Finton in the crib and stood staring at him, hands on hips, shaking her head. Now and then, she'd back away slightly, then circumspectly approach the crib, arms folded across her chest, and peer anxiously at the child.

“That's just foolish,” Tom said and squished out a cigarette when his mother darkened the doorway.

In the dim light, Nanny Moon squinted and said, “I wouldn't be surprised if he's a bit odd, that one.”

Taking notice of his wife's dismay, Tom sat blowing zeroes over his son's head. “He's branded now,” Nanny Moon said with a toss of her silvery head. “He might be took for a Moon with a mark like that.” She made the sign of the cross over his head, then ambled away, still mumbling to herself.

To Tom, the gesture appeared more like an exorcism than a blessing. “Not to worry,” he said. “There's nothing wrong with him that can't be fixed.”

Two weeks later, Finton's scar was barely visible, but his mother sometimes traced her finger across its shadowy arc and wondered how much the child had been damaged.

Sawyer

(1968)

Welcome to Darwin: God's Country, Pop. 2500

“Lies,” his father would say each time they rumbled past the large green sign on the side of the highway. “The works of it is nudding but dirty-arsed lies.”

One of Finton's favourite pastimes was sitting in the front seat of the powder blue Valiant, cruising from one end of Darwin to the other, while his father drove. They'd roll across the umbilical steel bridge connecting Darwin to the rest of the world, then a few more miles to the highway before turning around and heading back towards town. His father's guiding hand was centred at the top of the wooly steering wheel, his left arm dangling out the open window, a smoke protruding like an extra digit between his yellowed fingers. “Population's goin' down, Finton. More likely to see Satan than God—so it's not God's country no more, if it ever was. And no one here likes strangers.”

Legs dangling above the muddy floor mats, Finton would crane his neck to look up at his father when he spoke. He loved those rants about what was wrong with the world today. Tom Moon rarely alluded to days gone by. No one did, which left Finton to assume that the past was irrelevant. The bare historical fact was that Darwin was an insignificant trench created by a gargantuan glacier that scraped slowly across the face of Newfoundland a thousand centuries ago on its way to the ocean. As if in recompense for its accidental and violent birth, thousands of years later Darwin found itself cradled by ocean and hugged by forest. While farming such hard, salty land was a formidable vocation, Irish and English fishermen in the 1700s pegged the low-lying flatbed as an ideal refuge from which to instigate a cottage fishery. Their descendants in the late-twentieth century would regret the choice when the cod fell away, and Darwin became a town that could sustain existences but not livelihoods. But Finton knew nothing of this history and, furthermore, was unconcerned.