Mercy Read online

  Praise for MERCY

  “Mercy is compulsively readable, a triumph of York’s storytelling prowess. It would be an impressive novel from an established author; from a debut novelist, it is a small miracle, graceful and unflinching, violent and beautiful, heartfelt and haunting.… While it has much in common with Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees and Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning … Mercy is by far the strongest of the three novels, riskier, more challenging and, ultimately, more rewarding.”

  The Vancouver Sun

  “Lean and poetic … potently seductive.”

  Now (Toronto)

  “York is emotionally unflinching, and her writing is sharp-edged and intense. She can depict both beauty and rot with equal felicity.… The novel ultimately ascends to a level of Gothic melodrama that thousands of Fall on Your Knees fans will no doubt adore.… Rewarding … a blinding flash of light, a flare gun in a darkening universe of lost souls.”

  The Globe and Mail

  “The first novel by Winnipeg writer Alissa York is stunning in its emotive power and emotional resonance. York’s prose is taut and finely honed; her themes and the characters and settings that propel them are far-reaching and profound. It’s sensual, full of yearning and longing for the heat of love.… York has wrought a wonderful, thrilling, complex, immensely satisfying tale.… York’s novel is beauty in words, and Mercy be upon us.”

  The Hamilton Spectator

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2003

  Copyright © 2003 Alissa York

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in 2003 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited. Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  York, Alissa

  Mercy / Alissa York.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36629-0

  I. Title.

  PS8597.O46M47 2003a C813′.54 C2003-902074-6 PR9199.3.Y523M47 2003a

  v3.1

  for my mother, Ann,

  and as always

  for Clive

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part 1 - Then: (June 1948 – June 1949) Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part 2 - Now: (One June night, 2003) Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  what I wouldn’t give for arms to hold you.

  we are creatures of such like desires.

  Christine Fellows, “bird as prophet”

  The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.

  Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

  Sylvia Plath, “The Moon and the Yew Tree”

  THEN

  (June 1948 – June 1949)

  1

  BEEF: A GOOD BLEED

  Six o’clock. Thomas Rose steps out from behind his counter and crosses to the shop window, finding Train Street long with light, deserted for the supper hour. In the opposing storefront he can see Hy Warner bending to sweep the last feathery mound of hair into his dustpan. Thomas lifts his hand as Hy straightens, anticipating the barber’s evening wave. It’s a small thing—the kind of thing Thomas was dying for when he landed in Mercy, Manitoba, determined to call it home.

  He might not have made the best impression that day—a sweetish stench wafting before him down the corridors of the town hall—but he had an honest face, hard-working hands and, most importantly, the down payment in cash. Besides, the purchase seemed meant to be. The butcher shop’s previous owner was called Ross, so Thomas didn’t have to lay out for a whole new sign. Just change the second s to an e and it was Rose’s Fine Meats. To celebrate, he had the sign painter crack open a small can of red and add a garish, overblown rose.

  Upon finding that the place had no killing room, he immediately set about converting the garage. He had a sink plumbed in, sunk a drain in the concrete floor, screwed in hooks, rigged up a couple of block-and-tackle hoists. Two tables, a hog vat, a V-shaped box for lambs. It seemed the late Charlie Ross had taken on only butcher-ready carcasses and wholesale cuts. Thomas didn’t judge him for it, either. He knew better than anyone, slaughtering was a whole other thing.

  It’s four years now since he built it, and the killing room has long since paid off. It’ll keep on paying, too, just so long as there are those who haven’t the stomach to slaughter their own. Take the heifer he’s got tied up in there now, hauled in that morning by Ida Stone. Poor woman—husband long dead, stuck raising her drunk daughter’s kids.

  “They’ve gotten attached to the animal,” Ida confided across the cow’s back. “Especially the boy. You know how the city makes them. I’d keep her for a pet if I could, but a woman in my position doesn’t have a whole lot of choice.”

  “Never you mind, Mrs. Stone,” Thomas assured her. “She’ll come back to you in brown paper parcels. They’ll never be the wiser.”

  He’s a great comfort to the women of the town. They linger gossiping in his shop, find themselves buying finer cuts than they’re used to, asking for cooking tips, how long and how hot, even what side dish to serve. He listens to them, really listens. He doesn’t have to try, either—growing up, he was his mother’s only friend.

  He’s entertaining, too, another skill he honed at home, reaching down into Sarah Rose’s dark. Sometimes he impresses the housewives of Mercy with his hands, surprisingly agile for their size. Without warning he’ll take the tip of his knife to a steak fillet and carve a snowflake or a butterfly or a bird.

  He opens the screen door to pull the glass one shut, flips the sign to read Sorry We’re Closed. So what if he puts on a bit of a show. It’s good for business, and it doesn’t hurt to hear a woman’s laugh now and then, feel the warmth of a female smile. He pauses, grinning to himself. After tomorrow he’ll have all the female warmth he needs.

  He opens the killing-room door, and the cow lifts her head and lows softly. Thomas is good with animals, always has been. She’s calm, a little curious even, despite the strange surroundings, the rope at her ankles, the sledgehammer in his hand.

  He could’ve had his pick in that town. The hiccup in his heart kept him out of the war, but otherwise he’s in his prime, not exactly handsome, but not bad either, beefy, a build plenty of women like. His sandy brush cut harbours little grey. He owns his own business and the apartment above, and if he takes a drink now and then, it’s never more than two.

  He’s had offers. The Price girl hanging over his display case, all but spilling
out the top of her dress. Or Pauline Trask—those long, lashy stares while she complains about her husband going out on the rails for nights at a time. Rachel Kane has cooled off now she’s married, but Thomas can still remember the day she broke down in his shop, crying about her fiancé blown to bits overseas. She bawled until he offered a shoulder, then snuggled in close, moving her small, wet mouth against his neck.

  But there’s only ever been Mathilda. She was the first person he spoke to upon arriving in Mercy on foot, grey with road dust and reeking of pork. When he asked her for directions, she pointed without a single word. No one would call Mathilda pretty. Sloe-eyed and slender, with loose red hair, she made a far deeper impression than that. She was too young for marrying, so he waited. Four long years he waited, until the day she turned nineteen. Meantime, he heard all about her from behind his counter.

  Transplanted to Mercy at the tender age of nine, she was niece to the Catholic church housekeeper, the wild-oat progeny of a wayward brother long gone. Mathilda had her father’s looks, though most agreed they sat better on a boy—Jimmy Nickels always having been one to tie a girl’s stomach up in knots. God only knows what the mother was. She was either dead or no mother at all, for the child had been shut up in an orphanage since infancy.

  And just how did the housekeeper get wind of her abandoned niece? Some said Jimmy wrote a letter—one of very few indeed—in which he hinted at a Winnipeg girl he’d got in trouble and left behind. No return address but postmarked Yellowknife, or Vancouver, or Chicago, Illinois. Others claimed it was one of the sisters at the orphanage who wrote, a new one perhaps, who made an extra effort to track relations down. In any case, Vera Nickels boarded the westbound train alone and stepped off the eastbound two days later with her chin in the air and a slip of a girl in tow. It was anyone’s guess under what sordid circumstances Mathilda had been conceived. “You know those Catholics,” Louise Harlen said once, after making sure there were none in the shop.

  Thomas moves in close to the heifer and pats her hot flank. “Mmmmm,” he murmurs in her flicking ear, “mmm, mmmm.”

  He steps out in front of her and she lowers her head, closing her eyes for a scratch. As if through a scope, two cross-hairs appear, extending from the base of each horn to the opposite eye. Thomas hoists the sledge, strikes short and sure in the crook of the invisible cross. The cow sags, crashing to her side at his feet.

  From the beginning Mathilda put him in mind of a doe. Not the way most people think of them, passive and maternal, nibbling leaves. Thomas knew their insides. His old man took a yearly trip back to the bush he came from, hunting over the limit, out of season, regardless of sex—the owner of a slaughterhouse killing on his own time. The deer he hauled home were radiant beneath their hides, scanty scented fat over muscle meat rich and red. As graceful on the cutting table as they were among the trees. The loveliest carcasses Thomas had ever seen.

  He picks up his sticking knife and turns his back to the stunned cow, stretching its neck out long by bracing his boot heels against foreleg and jaw. Bending and reaching back between his legs, he starts at its breastbone, cutting a foot-long slit up the throat, deep enough so the windpipe shows. He lifts the blade out and re-enters where he began. Tip pointed to the shoulder-tops, he cuts down hard toward the head. Severed vessels spurt. Thomas spins round and stoops to grab the beast’s tail, placing one boot firmly on its side. Begins pumping, weight on the foot, then release and pull up hard on the tail. Over and over, make a heart of the body to hasten the bleed.

  INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI

  (i will go in unto the altar of god)

  It’s after midnight when Father August Day passes the wooden Welcome to Mercy sign three hours later than planned.

  It had all added up on the map, but once he turned off the trunk road, a mile was no longer simply a mile. Coyotes rose up from the fields and darted madly between his wheels. Deer looked round on the long columns of their necks, flashed their eyes and stepped delicately onto the road. North of Mercy, where the trees closed in, he passed through a cloud of bats. He was unused to driving anywhere, let alone in the wilderness dark. Many would’ve ploughed on through, flattening whatever was destined to die, but August braked and braked, eventually slowing to a crawl.

  It’s a good-sized town—about double his hometown of Fairview. As the road carries him south into Mercy’s heart, he mentally contrasts the two, taking comfort in every discrepancy he finds. To either side the sleeping houses look solid, more dependable than even the finest of Fairview’s wind-beaten homes. So much more sensible to nestle a settlement among trees than to raise it exposed on the plain.

  Hedged residences give way to shops—Harlen’s Pharmacy, Conklin Grocery, Taggart and Sons Dry Goods—August committing each new name to memory as he rolls slowly past. Idling at the centre of town, he glances up at the crossed signs—Fourth Avenue, Train Street—and thinks briefly of Fairview’s pitiful main drag.

  To his left, Train Street recedes in a line of storefronts, including the office of the Mercy Herald and a skinny barbershop complete with candy-stick pole. At the limit of his vision, a poorly lit brick station surrounded by freight cars at rest on a yard. August looks right. Some four or five blocks down, the street comes to an abrupt end, culminating in an imposing silhouette. He feels his heart kick. Takes the turn without signalling, pressing his foot to the gas.

  In his waking mind he’s saddened by the unexpected death of Father Rock, the pastor he was to assist. His dreams are a different story. In the land of no volition August steps blithely into the dead man’s gleaming shoes. He’s young to be taking on a parish—newly ordained, still growth-spurt thin at twenty-six—but the bishop saw past all that. He noticed August’s scholarly stoop, his old man’s mouth and stony eyes. At the news of Father Rock’s passing, he shocked the diocese by directing August to simply “carry on as planned.” One year as an administrator and, if all went well, Mercy would be his.

  August kills the engine and unfolds his lanky frame from the Plymouth’s front seat. He stares up into the blunt face of the church, its heavy peaked doors pointing to the central window—a rose motif, glimmering warmly, centred on the Madonna and Child. The Church of St. Mary Immaculate. Within these very stone walls he will give voice to the Gospel, administer the seven sacraments, celebrate the grace of God. He lets out a long, satisfied sigh. Alter Christus. Finally, another Christ.

  Beside the church, set back as though in modesty, the rectory’s cut from more of the same speckled stone. Its door opens slowly to reveal a small woman, shapeless in a dark housedress, her hair raked up high into a grizzled bun.

  “Father Day, I suppose?” Her voice carries sharply over the darkened yard, its tone belying his title, pronouncing him too green, too insubstantial to bear its weight. She has him at a disadvantage—he can’t make out her face, knows his own to be flooded with coloured light.

  “Correct,” he answers, returning his eyes to the church.

  “You’re late.”

  He steels himself. Stoops down for his cases, takes the flagstone path in loping strides. Up close he meets a face perhaps once oddly fetching, now thoroughly pinched and drained. She’s a good foot shorter than him, and she won’t look up.

  “I’m Vera Nickels,” she tells his chest, “housekeeper these forty years.”

  He nods.

  “There’s a wedding tomorrow, in case you didn’t know.”

  “I have been informed.”

  “It’s my own niece getting married.”

  “Yes.”

  “The poor girl’s tossing and turning upstairs.”

  He says nothing. Several seconds of stalemate elapse before she reaches inside to snap on the light. “Well, Father. Come in if you’re coming.”

  HIS EYES

  Mathilda’s mind moves sluggishly, her thoughts stumbling as though drugged. Wedding day. She can’t think how it happened, except that the butcher had asked.

  It certainly wasn’t the lure of family
. In all her years at St. Joseph’s, Mathilda never once joined the others in their favourite game. My perfect home, they called it, spinning candy houses and lovesick parents out of air. She pitied them. What good were parents? Of her father she knew nothing at the time, of her mother only what little the Sister Superior had seen fit to divulge. She had been a dancer. She had given birth south of the city, at a house for unwed mothers run by the St. Norbert Sisters of Misericorde. Shortly thereafter she had died.

  Many would have imagined a delicate woman on tiptoe, swathed in chiffon, lifted heavenward in a series of mournful pirouettes. Mathilda allowed herself no such luxury. To her the word dancer conjured up a painted face, a series of grotesque gyrations and vulgar, revealing kicks. While dancers gestured obscenely, she adopted the nun’s trick of keeping her hands hidden and clasped. While they hammered the floor with their heels, she cultivated the soundless convent glide.

  Let the other children dream of relations. When Mathilda projected a picture of herself into the future, it was inevitably a formal portrait of sorts, wherein she sat utterly composed and alone.

  The change, such as it was, came in the form of a single crab-handed page, its folds so sharp they looked to have been ironed. She was wedged between two baskets of mending, darning a worn elbow, when Sister L’Espérance dropped the letter in her lap. “Aunt?” Mathilda turned the word over cautiously in her mouth. “I have an aunt?”

  It’s nearly time. She knows this by the increased intensity with which her Aunt Vera yanks stray threads from the veil. Mathilda glances at herself in the mirror. With her rusty hair drawn back in a knot, she’s even more pie-faced and speckled than usual. She has no illusions, thinks herself neither pretty nor plain. Never having watched herself walk, she has no notion of her potential power over men.