Goodnight, Mr. Knight, page 8
I was more than startled. My Heavens were flattened. For a moment I felt dizzy. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“Well now you do. Bishop Humphries wants you to take the stand, put your hand on the Bible, and swear to God to tell the truth — and then lie your head off.”
“And if I don’t?”
“No more children, no more buds, and a bed in a rehab clinic.”
The buds were sitting on the kitchen counter, close enough that I could snatch them and run.
“I understand your reluctance, Sister Charlotte. But I have just given you a lesson in Church history to point out to you that telling a few lies pales in comparison to the atrocities of an institution filled with infections that will continue to fester long after you’re gone. Where is the bishop getting the money to pay me and to pay his legal fees, you might ask? From the Secret Society for the Protection of the Faith.”
“I won’t do it. Absolutely not.”
“Fruit from the poisoned tree, Sister Charlotte. You’ll just be one more sinner in an institution full of sin.”
The buds were within my reach but I would not reach for them, because even if I did, there would be no more free buds for me. I said, “Some religions say you must pray five times a day. Do you want me to do the same for the bishop and Father Eagleman? Instead of propping myself up on my pillow, I’ll fall on my aching knees and beseechingly repeat my prayers five times a day for the bishop and Father Eagleman. I’ll do that, but I will not swear on my Bible to tell the truth and then lie.”
“Well then, I’ll give you pills strong enough to take the pain from your knees so that you can pray five times a day. If that solves the problem, you won’t need to swear on the Bible and lie your head off. But, just in case history repeats itself, Sister Charlotte, and if your name must get added to that long list of sinners in an institution full of sin, then you will put your hand on the Bible and lie your head off.”
Mr. Knight’s piercing blue eyes demanded an immediate answer and I gave him one: “Ask Bella to do it. She was there. She knew what was going on.”
“I’ve already talked to Bella. She’s not in good shape. But if you can convince her to back off the booze and get herself in shape and take your place and lie her head off, that might work. Either way, keep in mind if Humphries goes down, the CFCS will take your children and put them back in the revolving door and put you in rehab to die a slow death from Huntington’s.”
He handed me the pills. “A month’s supply. I think you’ll like these. As you say, when you want to get moving, they’ll give you a boost. When you want to relax, they’ll make you relaxed.”
I hurried away and climbed into the waiting cab. Protect Father Eagleman? He was a monster. He knew where to squeeze without leaving a mark. How many times had I seen him use his black-belt training with the children? A word here, read it, boy, a sentence there, read it, boy, a paragraph now, read it, boy, and this page here, read it later, boy, and if you don’t, you little snot, did that burn your arm? Like a biting lightning jolt to sear each sacred word, sentence, and paragraph into the minds of each one of you little snots.
I won’t do it Mr. Knight. I won’t do it, Mr. Jesus. The thought of holding my Bible in a courtroom and lying about that man brings tears to my heart and turns my face red with shame.
From the back seat I asked the driver, “Do you have any water so I can take my pill?” When he turned to hand me the bottle of water, I thought, oh my goodness, Mr. Jesus has sent me the exact help I need. Not only is this man bearing the water for me to swallow the bud but he will tell me how to pray properly five times a day.
He said, “A nicely packaged can of Coca-Cola in the hourglass sand of the Arabian desert is no substitute for a plain bottle of cold water.”
He smiled. Then he pulled over to the curb and wrote the instructions on a pad in the front seat.
I settled back with the water. I took the pill. I waited. After a few minutes, the July sun on the taxi window warming my bones, I felt my hourglass turn itself upright and felt the sand begin to run again. This was good water, and these were good buds. If I had taken one at Mr. Knight’s, I might have been able to walk home on such a nice day. But then I would have missed meeting this nice Muslim driver.
Back in my bedroom I take another bud. I feel myself begin to drift into the sunlight flooding across my closed eyes. I feel the tightness leaving my face as the bootless and almost naked Mr. Knight comes down from the cross. He strokes my hair, his warm breath on my cheek, saying, Good idea, Sister Charlotte. Five times a day for the next few weeks is better that a lifetime in Hell.
Now Martha clumps down the stairs. Then Owen’s footsteps go along the hallway and into the bathroom. His pee hisses into the water. What splashes on the floor will stay until Saturday chores day, when Martha scrubs the tiles with Mr. Clean and puts in the new toilet paper.
“Sister Charlotte. Owen is putting minnows in the toilet tank.”
“Well, it is, after all, a waterproof container.”
“Not too smart, Sister Charlotte. Everyone hides their drugs in the toilet tank, but no one uses it to grow minnows.”
“I’ll get going in a minute, Martha. Take the sausage from the freezer and unload the dishwasher.”
“Owen was the last one in the washroom, and he won’t flush. Look at him. Pee drops on his shoes. And look at what else he did. Soon he’s going to start giving them names, like dropping his kids off at school. Are you in there, Sister Charlotte, or am I watching a silent movie? Who do you think looks after the mess he makes? The cleaning fairies? Oh, never mind. What’s the use?”
Chapter 18
MARTHA
Every day, after I had done my Sister Charlotte-given chores, usually cleaning the kitchen, I liked to sit at the old-fashioned dining-room table doing jigsaw puzzles from Walmart. Peter had put in the extra leaf to give me more space to spread out the pieces. That’s what I was doing the next time Bishop Humphries paid a visit. The sight of him made me want to hide under the table, like he was bending over, tap-tap, on the tabletop, peeking in at me. Hello in there, Martha.
He said, “Well, well, Martha, how is everything going? Fine at school, I hope. Making nice friends? I hear you’re in grade ten now.”
He stood by the table looking down at me. He was bigger than he looked, too big to fit into a small car, which is why he needed an SUV the size of an airplane to carry him around. Well okay, he was a bishop. From the corner of my eye, I could see his driver dressed in a black suit and black shirt, waiting at the door. Well okay, there was no driver. I thought a bishop should have a driver.
Then, with Sister Charlotte listening, he said, “The Martha in the Bible was a sister of Mary, as you are a sister of Owen.”
I corrected him. “Foster sister.”
“Yes. But like a real sister.”
“Thank you,” I said, not knowing why I said that. I hadn’t meant to. He hadn’t given me anything, hadn’t helped me with my puzzle. Well. I do know why. Looking up at his jet-black hair, my eyes sight-lined down to his scowly black jowls to follow the button line of his jacket, down the crease line of his pants to stop at his wide black shoes that were so shiny I could see in them my reflection, and it looked like he was standing on me. So I must have thanked him for not really standing on me.
After Bishop Humphries left, Peter and me sat on the green bench next to the apple tree. Petunia came along, so I took her up on my knee. Usually, I told Peter about my stupid teachers and the stupid kids and the grade ten boys liking the grade nine girls that giggled.
This time, I think because the bishop mentioned Owen being my brother, I opened my cellphone to show him what this so-called brother made me deal with at school. “Owen is an embarrassment. Print on a piece of paper GREEK SALAD and take out the R and you’ll describe Owen. Look at this one, Peter, standing at his locker. He’s so skinny his clothes hang on him wilted, and his hair sticks up in clumps of carrot slivers that haven’t rooted right, and his lopsided glasses hang off his nose like bent salad spoons. Even the cat that lives up the street thinks there’s something wrong with him, and something wrong with me because I’m his sister. I tell the kids at school I’m a foster sister, which is not a real sister, but they don’t know the difference. Sister is sister.”
Peter sighed. He stretched his arms across the back of the bench. “I know. He lives in his own bubble, no different from all those other fifteen-year-old geniuses, which is what he is.”
I think to make me feel better, for my fifteenth birthday, two weeks after Owen’s, Peter printed pictures taken from his digital camera from when we were ten and eleven, mostly of Petunia and me, printed up nice and pasted in an album that Peter got at the Dollar Store.
Looking back at these photographs of me, I saw an eleven-year-old kid who was a little too sturdy — Owen’s words were, “She’s carrying a recessive gene for plumpness.” Looking back, I saw Owen, who wore those big plastic-rimmed coke-bottle glasses that could sometimes see everything and sometimes see nothing, their plastic arms somehow fastened to satellite ears fastened into red hair that stuck up at the corners even though he combed it thirty-two times every day, his OCD thing. Why would Owen want to look back at pictures of himself? But to me, looking back, Petunia in photographs looked beautiful, and I loved her, something I had never before felt or never before given, until I met Peter.
I wish now, all these years later, sitting on Peter’s bench next to the apple tree watching the smoke coming out of the chimney and flatlining into the spires of St. Mary’s church, I wish I could have said that word “love” to Peter. Such an important word to never have said.
One time Sister Charlotte showed us some looking-back pictures of when, at eight years old, she sang on the Catholic Gospel Channel’s TV Hour. She looked like she got to the studio by limousine. She told me about being at the studio. First the makeup lady would comb her blonde hair and do something to highlight her blue eyes. Then the lady would fuss with her little-girl white dress and blue knee socks. Then the taping would begin.
“‘Ave Maria,’” said Sister Charlotte. “Even the men running the cameras and the microphones wiped their eyes when I finished. For the next song, the makeup lady fussed some more with my outfit and brushed more blush on my cheeks. The director told me to climb up on a stool and sit so everyone at home could see my knee socks. I held my head the way he said and sang the way he said, and when I finished everyone in the studio clapped and called me an angel.”
Not until Sister Charlotte showed us pictures of herself dressed in her blue-and-white private-school uniform, skipping across the yard and dancing through the blue-and-white knee-high flowers of the garden with fresh-trimmed grass around the apple tree, did I realize how much her eyes, which were dying, came alive with her telling of these stories that, I was now beginning to realize, she thought happened in this actual house. I thought, if only she could OD and die right now, believing she was ten years old at home in the same knee-high flowers and in the same fresh-trimmed grass around the same apple tree, and miss all the bad stuff I was seeing in the grey smoke twisting up from the crematorium chimney.
I thought, sitting on Peter’s bench looking forward to when I age out of the system — almost there in fact — I will not live anywhere that, when I look out the window, I’ll see smoke coming out of the crematorium chimney. I will not marry anyone with stick-up red hair or anyone with snot and black bits all over his hands. I’ll marry someone nice, like Peter, and have babies to push in a baby carriage, which is why, when I was a kid, I liked to dress Petunia in baby clothes, practising.
But I would never have silverware that needed laying out and polishing along with those stupid silver tea sets on those more stupid silver trays with those stupid silver round things for the cleaned and pressed napkins for the delicate fingers of guests. What was the point? There never were any guests.
Sister Charlotte would make me lay out the knives and the forks and the spoons on a towel, and while I did all the polishing, if I didn’t put back the forks and knives exactly right, Sister Charlotte would say, “You silly goose, Martha. That’s not how they go. This isn’t how it should be done. I learned this from Sister Elizabeth, in the fullness of time departed now, with her Saviour, released from earthly polishing.”
In the fullness of time, departed now, released from earthly polishing. It sounded like a prayer the way Sister Charlotte said it, looking forward to it.
Well, the guests arrived, appearing suddenly in the garden in the late-September afternoon the day after my fifteenth birthday. They showed Sister Charlotte their OPP badges. They stood by the stone fence, looking like suits at an outdoor wedding. The only thing missing was the gardenia in each buttonhole. They strolled into the living room. The one in the grey suit sat in the chair closest to the kitchen, polishing the lenses of his sunglasses the way I’d been polishing the silverware until, in the resulting shine, I could see my reflection. He held his glasses at arm’s length to look, but I don’t think he could see his reflection. He hadn’t spent enough time polishing.
The big one with pockets under his eyes, I remembered his name was Paul, sat on the chesterfield by the front window. The third, an older man, stood by the door. In the middle of the room, looking like the ghost of dead Sister Elizabeth, stood Sister Charlotte.
She pulled herself together and offered coffee and rhubarb squares, served with the freshly polished silverware, which meant I would need to polish again. Sister Charlotte said, “Owen will take your orders for coffee or tea and a rhubarb square. Make your order as complicated as you like. He won’t write anything down, but he will remember, and you will get what you requested.”
Paul, the big one with the pockets, said, “As you may or may not remember from the last time, my name is Paul. I would like a cup of coffee, three lumps of sugar but no cream, and two rhubarb squares.”
Sister Charlotte said, “From Peter’s garden, baked by Martha.”
She pointed at me. I felt like the kitchen help.
“And brought to you by Martha.” Sister Charlotte pointed again. This time I gave a smile and a curtsy so polished I bet it looked like I’d been upstairs rehearsing their arrival. I don’t know. Maybe I should have been.
Sister Charlotte said, “If you ask for half a rhubarb square, then that’s what you will get. If you ask for two lumps, you will get two lumps. See if I’m not right.”
Owen remembered, I cut and poured and delivered, cutesy curtsy, doing the rounds with the silver tray set.
Not using his fork to pick up his rhubarb square, Paul put the whole piece into his mouth. Then, remembering his manners, perhaps because I was watching him, Paul picked up his fork and cut off a bite of his second rhubarb square and put it into his mouth and said, still chewing, “Any visits from Bishop Humphries, Sister Charlotte?” Paul wiped his fingers with his napkin. “Any word from Bella, Sister Charlotte?”
The man standing at the door said, “Bella is around here someplace. I’m well trained in the area of knowing when someone is around here someplace.”
Sister Charlotte stalled for a moment longer before coming back with, “What is this about exactly?”
Paul turned his napkin inside out and wiped his fingers. I took the pot and filled his cup. He took the little server creamer from the tray and took two lumps from the silver sugar bowl. When I asked if he would like another rhubarb square, he said, “No, thank you,” so I took away his red-smeared plate.
Glancing from me to Sister Charlotte, Paul said, “Perhaps, Sister Charlotte, you and I could talk in private outside.”
Sister Charlotte paused. She set down her napkin and her cup.
Paul said, “A nice fall day, Sister. How would you like to show us the back garden?”
Sister Charlotte said, “What is the best that you can give a child, Paul? What else but a strong moral and spiritual foundation to carry each one through life. Isn’t that so, Martha?”
Shrug, sniffle. “I guess so.”
“There you have it. A testimonial from our foster child, who as the result of being raised in a structure of strict discipline based on the scriptural teachings, has become a model child. Isn’t that so, Martha?”
“I guess so.”
When Paul glanced at me, I saw above those pockets, concern in his eyes. It was a glance that turned into a look of understanding that said, I know you want to meet your mother and I’ll do my best to find her for you. You’re a fine individual and a strong girl, and you deserve a decent mother.
Although he never said that, at that moment, that’s how I felt. I felt proud to be Martha. I was not cute and girly. I was not a cheerleader at school. I didn’t have my picture in the school yearbook. I didn’t even have a boyfriend. But at fifteen I was capable, competent, strong, and polite and would have, in the old days — like the Bible Martha, who had lived with the sackcloth Brothers by the Dead Sea in that movie we saw, where those Bible stories came from in the first place — I would have been the one to go into the woods with a baby strapped to my back to gather sticks for the fire and make the meals and clean the kitchen and climb the face of the cliff to look after my mother as I was now looking after my foster mother. I saw recognition of all that in those eyes above the pockets.
But after the stroll through the garden and his talk with Sister Charlotte, Paul’s do-my-best promise seemed to have changed. As they were leaving, Paul took me to one side and said, “I’m sorry, Martha. But we can’t, at this point, give you more information about your mother.”
